Led by its founder, artistic director and principal conductor Gintaras Rinkevičius, the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra opens its 30th anniversary concert season with a special programme featuring the world-renowned violin virtuoso Vadim Repin. Repin's amazing talent shone through at a very early age when at 11 he won the gold medal in the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition and gave his recital debuts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Aged 14 he made his debuts in Tokyo, Munich, Berlin, Helsinki and a year later at the prestigious Carnegie Hall, New York. Since then Vadim Repin has been recongnised as one of the greatest violinists of our times performing with the world's top orchestras including London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra and others. Repin's recordings with Mischa Maisky, Lang Lang and Nicolai Lugansky won the prestigious Echo Classic and BBC Music awards. Fiery passion with impeccable technique, poetry and sensitivity are Repin's trademarks, which you will be able to witness tonight. On LSSO's anniversary season opening night at the Vilnius Congress Concert Hall Vadim Repin will perform Valse-Scherzo for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 34 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93) and Violin Concerto No. 2 by Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953). The artist plays on the 1733 violin by Antonio Stradivari.
The second part of the concert features Tchaikovsky's majestic Manfred Symphony based on Lord Byron's dramatic poem of the same name. Setting about this programmatic work reluctantly, Tchaikovsky later wrote in his letters: "The symphony has turned out vast, serious, difficult, swallowing up all my time, sometimes wearing me completely, but an inner voice tells me that I am not labouring in vain and that the work will be, perhaps, the best of my symphonic compositions." Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony has a special place in Gintaras Rinkevičius' musical career as with this particular work he won the 5th All-Union Conductors Competition in 1983, when he was just 23.