About

For young Brazilian Guido Felipe Sant’Anna e Silva, the 2022 International Violin Competition of Austrian American violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler was decisive – winning first prize opened up a wide range of international career opportunities for the then seventeen-year-old performer. In addition to the monetary prize, the competition, held annually in Vienna since 1979, has also rewarded Sant’Anna e Silva with significant concert offers, including an invitation from the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society to perform with the major Lithuanian orchestras. For his concert in Lithuania, Sant’Anna e Silva chose a gem of the classical violin repertoire – Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin concerto in E minor.

Martynas Stakionis, a frequent guest conductor at the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society, is a graduate of the Hamburg Academy of Music and Theatre and the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. He has conducted the Hamburg, Mozarteum, Lithuanian National and other symphony orchestras, and has worked in France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Norway as well as other Baltic countries. In 2018, the young maestro won the Norwegian Critics’ Association Award for the best performance of the season at the Bergen Music Festival, where he conducted Kremerata Baltica Orchestra in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Fachwerk. Stakionis has won numerous prizes in various international conducting competitions.

In addition to Mendelssohn’s Concerto for violin and orchestra in E minor, tonight’s programme will also feature two more romantic opuses: the overture to the opera Der Freischütz (The Free shooter) by the father of German romantic opera, Carl Maria von Weber, and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No 5 in B flat major, a musical allusion to the symphonic works of Mozart.