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The synergy on this album between three personalities – poet Inese Zandere, composer Raimonds Pauls and conductor Ints Teterovskis – has become one of the ports of call in the BALSIS (which means ‘voices’ in Latvian) Youth Choir’s “river story”, a special journey that it embarked on already a decade ago. Songs About Latvian Rivers features a lesser-known cycle of eight a cappella choral songs composed by Pauls with poetry by Zandere. The album (CD, streaming and download format) will be released on March 17.
Special is also the participation of both artists in the album – with Pauls at the piano and Zandere reading – on River Poetry, the last track on the album. Ints Teterovskis is convinced that as long as Zandere continues writing about rivers and as long as young people respond to Latvian choral music, BALSIS will continue to flow along smaller and larger rivers to wider waters.
“A river has its own path. For me, the river is a path, the life force. You can remain in one spot, or you can surrender to the current and move forward. No matter whether the river gets wider or narrower, it always flows into bigger waters. This is a very long-awaited album. Several “generations” of our choir have already sung the River Songs cycle. A constantly changing line-up is characteristic of youth choirs, but this also generates new musical ideas. It’s wonderful that every time we learn a song anew, we rediscover it – in a different color, with a different feeling, – says the conductor Ints Teterovskis.
The River Songs cycle can be traced back to the 2010 Latvian School Youth Song and Dance Festival. Inese Zandere was commissioned to write a cycle of eight poems, for which eight composers would then each compose music for an a cappella choir for one part of the cycle. She chose to write about Latvia’s rivers. Raimonds Pauls, for his part, took a liking to the poems and later composed his own music for all eight poems. This a cappella choral cycle by Pauls came as a surprise to many, because he is better known for his choral songs with accompaniment as well as his repertoire for children’s choirs and choral arrangements of his own songs in the popular-music genre.