Held across four weekends in two Latvian cities, the Riga Jurmala Festival quickly made its mark in its first season in 2019. Covid-19 brought the 2020 festival to an abrupt stop, although masterclasses transferred to an online format, but artistic director Martin Engstroem has come back confidently to announce the next edition for July and August 2021.
Latvia has produced many great classical musicians, but one of the very finest was conductor Mariss Jansons. He was scheduled to conduct the very first concert in the inaugural Riga Jurmala Festival in 2019, but illness robbed him of the opportunity. His death last November indeed robbed the musical world of one of its greats, but two of the orchestras of which Jansons was chief conductor appear in the 2021 festival. Both those orchestras – the Bavarian Radio Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw – are currently still without new chief conductors, so it will be fascinating to see how two British conductors – Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Daniel Harding respectively – make their mark in their Latvian appearances.
Each of the four weekends features an orchestral mini-residency – two in Riga, two in Jurmala. Gardiner and the Bavarians launch the festival in July. “If I were a pianist, I would carry this hall’s acoustic around with me,” wrote Roy Westbrook when reviewing from the Dzintari Concert Hall in 2019. The lucky pianist on that occasion was Yuja Wang and she is back in the Dzintari to play Brahms’ mighty First Piano Concerto, a 50-minute epic of the concerto repertoire which really stretches the fingers. Gardiner pairs it with the Second Symphony by Brahms’ great friend, Robert Schumann. It’s a restless, rebellious work, but leads to an upbeat finale. Gardiner then swaps the composers around for his second programme: Schumann’s Piano Concerto (with soloist Sir András Schiff) and a Brahms symphony, the thrusting First.
Harding and the Royal Concertgebouw are the other visitors to the Dzintari Hall on the closing weekend. The RCO has a noble tradition as Bruckner interpreters and they play the Seventh Symphony, a mighty work whose Adagio features a single cymbal clash at its climax, composed – according to legend – when Bruckner received news of the death of Richard Wagner. The heavyweight programme also has Yefim Bronfman playing Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. Harding’s second concert turns French and neoclassical: Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune and La Mer provide colour; soprano Renée Fleming performs Olivier Messiaen’s song cycle Poèmes pour Mi; and Stravinsky’s ballet Agon brings clean, neoclassical lines.