Kremerata Baltica and our artistic leader Gidon Kremer are honored and humbled to receive an award for the “Defense and Dissemination of Religious Music” in the “Ensemble” category at the Religious Music Week Festival in Cuenca, Spain. The award in the “Personal Achievements” this year was received by Arvo Pärt. The Week of Religious Music of Cuenca, created in 1962, is one of the most important annual musical events in Holy Week, being one of the main festivals in Europe.

We were very happy to take part in this special festival performing two concerts with the music of Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli, Mieczysław Weinberg and Dmitri Shostakovich. For our first concert we were joined by the great soloists Gidon Kremer and Tatiana Grindenko, who performed together a piece dedicated to them by Arvo Pärt in 1977 – “Tabula Rasa”. The part of the prepared piano was played by our dear friend Reinut Tepp. Among other pieces we performed Weinberg’s Symphony No.2, which we have recently recorded under the leadership of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla for Deutsche Grammophon label along with Weinberg’s Symphony No.21 – the CD which will be released in May 2019.

During our second concert we have performed Giya Kancheli’s “Silent Prayer” with the soloists Gidon Kremer, Giedre Dirvanauskaite and Andrei Pushkarev.  We dedicated this piece to the tragic events at the Notre-Dame de Paris. During the second half of the concert we have performed the last quartet of Shostakovich, No.15 in arrangement for string orchestra by Gidon Kremer and Victor Kissine.

The review of our concerts is available here.

We want to express our gratitude to the great team of The Week of Religious Music of Cuenca festival for their hard work and kindness. We had a great time in Cuenca and wish you all the best for your upcoming concerts!