Pillow Talk. Vocal Chamber Music Duo Felsberga&Eckhaut

Evening artists:

Katrīna Paula Felsberga - soprano

Justine Eckhaut - piano

With great joy, we welcome one of the brightest Latvian soprano voices of her generation, Katrīna Paula Felsberga, to the Ola Foundation cultural space. After the beautiful and audience-loved concert program Across the River. Ziedonis and Vācietis (2023), she returns to Ola together with French pianist Justine Eckhaut to present a new and special vocal chamber music program.

In recent years, Katrīna Paula Felsberga has confidently established herself both in opera roles and in chamber music and contemporary music interpretation. The singer stands out for her vocal virtuosity, musical intelligence, and stage presence, which allow her to work equally convincingly across different genres.

This time she is joined by French pianist Justine Eckhaut, an outstanding chamber musician and prizewinner of several international competitions. The duo Felsberga&Eckhaut, formed by the two artists, won 1st prize at the Franz Schubert and Modern Music International Competition in Graz in 2025, establishing itself as one of the most promising young vocal chamber music ensembles in Europe.

Pillow Talk is a concert program about intimacy, longing, and the most fragile states of love. The title comes from the English expression pillow talk - the quiet conversations spoken at night between two people.

About the program, the artists say: “Pillow Talk is a musical story that leads to that special state of consciousness in which a person no longer quite belongs to themselves. The moment when the other person is not yet beside you, or perhaps never will be, but in imagination their presence becomes almost tangible. Psychologist Dorothy Tennov called this threshold between longing and obsession limerence - the early stage of falling in love, in which euphoria and restlessness, hope and vulnerability exist at the same time.

It is no coincidence that the Lied, or art song genre, becomes the home for such a story. Vocal chamber music has always been an art of intimacy and subtle gestures. It is music that creates the illusion that the listener has accidentally become a witness to someone’s most intimate thoughts.

The concert program Pillow Talk features songs by Franz Schubert, Claude Debussy, and Alma Mahler, contemporary scores by Kaija Saariaho and Christian Jost, as well as blues by Nina Simone and the irony of German cabaret. Works from different eras, musical languages, and aesthetics touch the human inner world in its most intimate moments and address the question: what does a person do with love when the other is out of reach?