One of the world’s most famous orchestras, Camerata Salzburg, and violinist Janine Jansen return to Lithuania to perform at the Vilnius Festival. A couple of years ago, these music masters presented a concert to Vilnius on its 700th anniversary, and this time they will perform Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis’ String quartet in C minor (orchestral version) as a commendation on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The Orchestra was founded in 1952 by conductor and musicologist Bernhard Paumgartner. As the reviewers of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung write, the ensemble, now in its seventh decade of existence, has retained “an infectious joy of music making”.

Camerata Salzburg performs extensively in its home country and in renowned concert halls from the USA to China, including Vienna’s Konzerthaus, New York’s Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Zurich’s Tonhalle, Philharmonie de Paris, Elbphilharmonie and the Shanghai Concert Hall, etc. The Orchestra is the main ensemble of the Mozarteum and a participant of the Salzburg Festival and Mozart Week (Mozartwoche), the most important events in Austria. Musicians of more than 20 nationalities are representing Viennese classical music, in particular the music of Salzburg’s son Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, as well as works from Romanticism to the present day.

The Times has described Dutch violinist Janine Jansen’s playing as “brilliant, delicate and simply unearthly”. She performs with some of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, is a Decca recording artist. List of the prestigious awards she received includes the Herbert von Karajan Prize (2020) and the Dutch State Johannes Vermeer Culture Prize (2018). Jansen initiated the Utrecht Chamber Music Festival in 2003 and is now its honorary artistic director. Since 2020, Janine Jansen has played Antonio Stradivari’s unique 1715 Shumsky-Rode violin, generously loaned by a European benefactor.

Tonight’s programme includes the popular and much-loved Violin concerto in E minor by the German composer Felix Mendelssohn (1844), as well as his perhaps lesser-known Symphony No. 5 in D major/D minor (Reformation). The Violin concerto has been at the top of the violin repertoire of all times, and its creative and technical solutions have attracted attention of many composers. In 1906, the Austrian composer, conductor and violinist Joachim named it a treasure of the heart. Mendelssohn’s Fifth Symphony, completed in 1832, was dedicated to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. At that time the composer intensively studied Bach’s oeuvre and its idiosyncrasy, which is why it has been incorporated into the symphony’s score: Mendelssohn used the intonations of Martin Luther’s chorale Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott, and the echoes of the sequence Dresdner Amen, with the finale’s allusions to the choral prelude.

As mentioned above, the concert will open with the first Lithuanian professional string quartet. M. K. Čiurlionis composed it in 1901 while studying in Leipzig with Professor Carl Reinecke, who liked the piece very much. First performed at the Leipzig Conservatoire, the opus impresses with its clear form, balanced texture, romantic lyricism and a whiff of Lithuanian pastoral. The finale of the opus was lost. The work is performed as a three-movement cycle and in this form solidly represents both Čiurlionis’ work and Lithuanian chamber music.

The concert is partly funded by the Ministry of Culture’s Professional Art Promotion Programme

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