About

Tonight, the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra invites you to build musical bridges between East and West, as well as to meet the Orchestra’s guests from Turkey, harpist Çağatay Akyol and conductor Murat Cem Orhan. The concert will feature the magnificent Concerto for harp and orchestra in B flat major by Georg Friedrich Händel and the atmospheric St. Paul’s Suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, as well as Sinfonietta per archi by Ulvi Cemal Erkin, a member of the 'Turkish Five' and the father of Turkish symphonic music, and the Symphony for string orchestra by the Azerbaijani composer Fikret Amirov.

Conductor Orhan has appeared with major orchestras in Turkey as well as with orchestras around the world. He also has staged a number of operas in various theatres. For a couple of years, he was the artistic director of the Cemal Reşit Rey Concert Hall in Istanbul and principal conductor of the CRR Symphony Orchestra; he has performed with the Olten Philharmonic Orchestra at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw. Orhan studied conducting, singing and composition in Turkey, New York and Venice.

Already known to Vilnius audiences, harpist Akyol has appeared with various orchestras in Turkey and Europe, and has performed at festivals such as Salzburg, Mahler in Amsterdam, Schleswig-Holstein, Wien Modern, BBC Proms, Festival de Radio France en Montpellier, Ferrara Musica, has collaborated with Claudio Abbado, Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly, Péter Eötvös, Giuseppe Sinopoli and other renowned conductors.

Concert partners – Turkish Embassy in Vilnius, Turkish-Lithuanian Chamber of Commerce