Latvia mourns a national composer

Latvia mourns a national composer

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norman lebrecht

August 10, 2017

The composer Pēteris Plakidis, who was named music director of the national theatre while still at college and later composed many works for national institutions, died this week at 70.

He was married to the opera singer, Maija Krīgena.

You can sample his music here.

Comments

  • John Borstlap says:

    Truly beautiful and meaningful music, and an original voice on top of that. This is the music that should have been heard in the concert halls in the West since the sixties instead of the nonsense of modernism and sonic art and vulgar ‘hip’…… While the pretentious nitwits populated the margins of music life with their loudmouth propaganda, pushing the central performance practice into a defensive museum culture, in the east the musical tradition developed on its own accord.

    • Scotty says:

      Another death, another chance to stand on the soapbox for John Borstlap. God forbid that he would be invited to a funeral.

      • John Borstlap says:

        You should dig a hole in your backyard and bury your head in deep shame.

        • jaypee says:

          How about you shut up for a change?

          “the nonsense of modernism and sonic art ”

          How many times have you posted the same comments over the years? Do you think anyone cares for what a frustrated composer with an ego problem has to say about Xenakis or Stockhausen?

  • jaypee says:

    If the hole has been initially been dug to accommodate you and your ego, Scotty and I can probably come with our families, our friends and our record and book collections… and still have plenty of room left.

    • John Borstlap says:

      We have been discussing this comment for a while, but could not work-out what it meant or where it refers to, but the idea of some thorough gardening appealed quite much to us, since we think there much too much music around the place.

      Sally

  • John Borstlap says:

    Interestingly, in Eastern Europe, where a glass bell of government instruction was put over music production during the soviet era, the spirit of the tonal tradition survived – albeit in a cage so to speak. In the same time, Western governments financially supported modernism as an expression of the free spirit of the West, and ‘avantgarde composers’ and their supporters cultivated a comparable mental prison as a kind of mirror image of the east. At both sides, a climate of party lines, prescriptions, and ideology reigned, for different reasons.

    So much good music has been written in the East under difficult circumstances, while so much nonsense was ‘created’ in the West in so-called freedom, but in the end it seems that music like Plakidis’ and Pärt’s will survive, and the Western nonsense won’t.

    Future cultural anthropologists will lick their fingers when studying this absurdity.

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