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4.5.2010 Extravagant recitals and poetic orchestral music concerts at Vilnius Festival 2010
The Vilnius Festival 2010 will take place at the National Philharmonic Hall from 28 May to 6 June. It promises a concentrated and intense programme to be presented in ten days. The programme comprises seven events: three orchestral music concerts, three extravagant recitals and the appearance of the jazz big band. Among the highlights of the festival are Eastern performers, interpreting the Western classical repertoire; Grigory Sokolov, a pianist of nearly mythic stature, who will tame the mechanics of the piano; tenor Edgaras Montvidas who will reveal his vocal skills as a recitalist, after appearing in opera productions across Europe; and Edin Karamazov, known for his affection for unexpected amalgams and paradoxical juxtapositions.
Having hoisted the festival’s sail, an outstanding international crew of the opening concert will launch the programme of the Vilnius Festival on 28 May. The crew’s lodestars are Japanese conductor Tomomi Nishimoto, whose head-spinning international career sprang from her childhood fascination with Russian music, and Serbian pianist Tamara Stefanovich, who at the age thirteen became the youngest student at the Belgrade University and now performs in major cultural centres across Europe and in the US. Along with Schumann’s poetic Piano Concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s take on One Thousand 
and One Nights, the programme will also feature an opus by Rodion Shchedrin, dedicated to the 600th anniversary of one of the most glorious events in Lithuania’s history – the Battle of Grunwald. The theme of intercultural dialogue will build a conceptual link from the first to the last concert of the festival’s programme. On 6 June, the soloist of the concert, a young Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan will share the stage with an established Chinese conductor Chen Zuohuang, who is claimed to be the most prominent Asian conductor after the Japanese master of the baton, Seiji Ozawa. For four years he has been the Music Director of Incheon Philharmonic Orchestra (established in South Korea in 1966) that he is going to conduct at the Vilnius Festival.
On 2 June, tenor Edgaras Montvidas opens the Vilnius Festival’s extravagant series of three recitals. His solo appearance is a rare opportunity to get absorbed in the world of delicate and fleeting vocal music of the 19th and 20th centuries. “Home means spiritual comfort for me,” confesses the soloist. He returns to his native Lithuania with pianist Simon Lepper, who is highly regarded by the international audiences and the press as an extraordinarily gifted expert of the vocal repertoire. Next day, on 3 June, the stage will be taken up by Russian pianist Grigory 
Sokolov, who is often referred to as “Dostoyevsky at the piano” and is widely regarded as a living piano legend. He is going to present a programme of ‘pure music’ including works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schumann. After Sokolov’s recital in Paris, Le Figaro wrote: “As in case with Glenn Gould, yet taking into account the different aesthetics, one might say that there is Sokolov and there are other pianists.” Meanwhile, on 5 June, Edin Karamazov will remain committed to paradoxical juxtapositions, combining a lute and 
an electric guitar – a fragile Renaissance-Baroque instrument and a symbol of the 20th-century rock culture – to perform the works by famous Hawaiian guitar classic Leo Brouwer and Johann Sebastian Bach.
On 1 June, the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra (LCO) will be joined by two ‘string magicians’: cellist Alexander Kniazev, a mysterious personality considered perhaps the most charismatic cellist of our time, and violinist Sergey Krylov, an artistic director and conductor of LCO renowned for his exceptional 
musical empathy. On 4 June, the Festival’s traditional jazz concert will take place, this time featuring the Brussels Jazz Orchestra – one of the best known collectives of this genre on the European jazz scene. Several years ago, the American Down Beat magazine listed this orchestra among the ten best big bands of the world. The orchestra will play jazz standards and the compositions by the orchestra’s founder and leader Frank Vaganée, who has drawn inspiration from Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, Lennie Tristan and Ornette Coleman.
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