CONVERSATIONS WITH FELDMAN // ARENA 2026

Featuring: Andžejs Karaļovs | Andrzej Karałow (piano), Kaspars Kurdeko (percussion)

Program: Morton Feldman | Morton Feldmann, improvisations by Andžejs Karaļovs | Andrzej Karałow and Kaspars Kurdeko

The fourth program of the ARENA New Music Festival is a story about a special encounter. For the first time on one stage, Polish pianist Andžejs Karaļovs and Latvian percussionist Kaspars Kurdeko will make music together. They meet to have a musical conversation with each other and to reflect sonically on the piano music of the American cult composer Morton Feldman. Karaļovs and Kurdeko, each with their own strikingly original musical experience, together with a master of the 20th century whom we honor this year on his 100th anniversary.

Recipient of the Great Music Award 2025 for Outstanding Achievement in Jazz, Kaspars Kurdeko is a sensitive and intelligent musician. An artist who will never put himself in the foreground unless the musical material entrusted to him demands it. Nuance and subtlety, a deep focus on detail, careful listening, and an adventurous surrender to sonic exploration are the special qualities of his playing and interplay. No less important is the fact that Kaspars can find those special and right colors not only in the jazz arena. The Warsaw native Andžejs Karaļovs can also truly be called a master of color - a laureate of several international competitions and a versatile talent with a broad outlook. His piano playing is marked by musical depth, a strong individuality, and an interest in new forms of expression. Alongside the classical repertoire, he is drawn to composition and free improvisation, while his interest in visual art and photography encourages him to seek connections between different fields of art.

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ARENA is a contemporary music festival that, since 2002, has gathered composers of new music, performers, and listeners from many countries around the world every autumn in Latvian concert halls. The festival motto, HEAR THE FUTURE!, contains the festival's main idea and goal - to present the diversity of contemporary music in all its splendor, encouraging the creation, performance, and documentation of new music.

This year, from October 27 to November 13, ARENA will take place for the 25th time, inviting audiences to five concerts where light and darkness, faith and fear, prophecies and myths, silence, electronics, and unheard sounds will meet. The festival will open with the Peteris Vasks Quartet performing music by Peteris Vasks, Arvo Pärt, and Olivier Messiaen, while it will close with one of ARENA's most ambitious events - the premiere of the chamber opera "The Abduction of Europe" by Gundega Šmite and Dimitris Maronidis. Two world premieres in the concert "Prophecies" will also be especially anticipated - new works by Klaus Lang and Santa Bušs. Composer Santa Bušs is also opening a new chapter in the festival's history this autumn by becoming ARENA's artistic director.

As one of Latvia's long-standing new music festivals, ARENA has never stopped searching for what will be next in music. This autumn, that gaze toward the future also takes on a dimension of mystery and foreboding. The festival invites you to look into a world where the known meets the unknown, light meets darkness, and reality meets myth: from spiritual light and trust in God in the music of Peteris Vasks, Arvo Pärt, and Olivier Messiaen to the allure of darkness, fear, and the unpredictability of electronic sound; from prophecies and ritual to Morton Feldman's fragile, almost weightless soundscape. At the festival's close, myth will enter our own time in the chamber opera "The Abduction of Europe," bringing the ancient story face to face with today's Europe.

Four ARENA concert evenings will take place at Riga Reformed Church, while the festival finale - the premiere of the chamber opera "The Abduction of Europe" - will be at Hanzas Perons. All concerts start at 7:00 PM.

More: arenafest.lv

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