XXIX Pažaislis Music Festival

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the composer’s death

“Giacomo Puccini was born here on 22 December 1858, coming from a long line of musicians and worthy of keeping alive the traditions of his homeland. He created melodies that were easy to remember, enriching them with new voices of life. As a renowned master, he reaffirmed the value of the national art to the whole world with stylistically perfect and flexible forms.
A city proud of its son on the 30th day after his death.
29 December 1924.”
This respectful inscription can be read on a plaque affixed to an old house on Via di Poggia in Lucca, in the Tuscany region. Here, in the family of the musician Michele Puccini, a fifth child was born, a long-awaited boy who was named Giacomo in honour of the family’s first composer, their great-grandfather. It was this boy who was destined to make the Puccini family name known throughout the world.

Puccini was an opera composer in the true sense of the word. It is not for nothing that he is considered to be the continuator of Giuseppe Verdi’s tradition in Italian musical theatre. Puccini was the last representative of classical Italian opera and, sensitive to the trends of the age, he was constantly looking for ways to renew the artistic means of expressing opera. His work had a significant influence on the subsequent development of 20th century European opera. True to the traditions of realist art, Puccini, an artist and a humanist, created immortal works that have forever entered the treasury of world musical culture: his operas Boheme, Tosca, Turandot, Madame Butterfly, Manon Lescaut, Gianni Sicchi, Sister Angelica and others are still successfully performed in opera houses all over the world.

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the great opera master’s death, the Pažaislis Music Festival, in collaboration with the Kaunas State Philharmonic Orchestra, presents a wonderful concert where the most beautiful arias, duets, choral scenes and instrumental numbers from the operas of Puccini will be performed by the most outstanding soloists and artistic ensembles. Conducted by Constantine Orbelian, the Kaunas City Symphony Orchestra will play and the vocal Kaunas State Choir will sing. We will hear the soprano of Viktorija Miškūnaitė, a renowned Lithuanian opera soloist, winner of two Golden Stage Crosses, and the tenor voice of Karols Kašiuba, a singer of the younger generation, who is climbing up the ladder of his career very quickly and is praised by music critics.