On June 6, the bells of Pažaislis Monastery will announce the start of the 31st Pažaislis Music Festival. The opening concert will feature guests from Switzerland – the St. Gallen Symphony Orchestra conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas and the audience’s favorite, accordionist Martynas Levickis.
The St. Gallen Symphony Orchestra consists of about seventy musicians from more than twenty countries around the world. The orchestra is based in the St. Gallen Concert Hall, built in 1909 and recently renovated for better acoustics. The ensemble performs operas, operettas, and musicals at the St. Gallen Theater and the St. Gallen Festival, and chamber music in various forms is also part of its artistic activities. In recent years, the orchestra has released several internationally acclaimed CDs, gained recognition for premiering contemporary Swiss music, and collaborates regularly with radio and television. The history of the orchestra dates back to the mid-19th century, when music enthusiasts from St. Gallen organized the first subscription concerts. In 1877, the orchestra became a permanent music ensemble under the auspices of the St. Gallen Concert Society, and in 2018, the internationally renowned Lithuanian conductor M. Pitrėnas became the orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director.
M. Levickis, well known to Lithuanian audiences, is a musician who constantly brings fifteen kilograms of passion to the stage, constructed from twelve thousand details. He calls birds and trees his first music teachers, and the Lithuanian forest his best concert hall. M. Levickis was described by The Independent as “an incredibly talented man who is reinventing the accordion all by himself.” The performer himself calls his instrument a “magic box of tricks.” And indeed, when he puts on his accordion and starts playing, he creates truly enchanting soundscapes, his virtuoso playing impressive, varied, and unexpected.
The audience will be able to enjoy Levickis’ virtuosity as he performs Swedish composer Daniel Nelson’s impressive concerto for accordion, “The Ghost Machine Treatise.” At the beginning of the concert program, the orchestra and conductor will invite the audience to listen to Swiss composer Fabian Künzli’s 2024 work “So klingt St. Gallen”, which creates a musical portrait of this place with the help of city sounds woven into the orchestra’s score. And the concert will culminate with one of the most famous classical music scores – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth (Fate) Symphony.
The Ghost Machine Treatise – program notes
Rumour has it that the last invention Thomas Edison completed was a Spirit Phone, the function of which was to detect the presence of souls of the dead. Spiritism and
seances where all the rage at the time, and often considered a true science. Allegedly, upon completing his contraption, Edison invited the most well-known mediums of the era to conduct a seance; his thinking was that if the psychics could establish a spiritual connection with the dead, then his Spirit Phone would be able to detect an increased
movement of electrons and protons in the room, thus proving the physical existence of spirits. Unlike all of Edison’s former inventions, the results of the Spirit Phone were not documented, and the entire project was soon forgotten by historians. But what if the Spirit Phone had worked? What if it had been mass marketed and sold to consumers world wide? Surely such a machine would need a manual. The Ghost Machine Treatise takes its compositional point of departure from what might be included in such a manual, each of the work’s six movements corresponding to a fictitious chapter of the manual for Thomas Edison’s Spirit Phone.
The Ghost Machine Treatise was written for, and in close collaboration with, Lithuanian accordionist Martynas Levickis who premiered the work in 2023 together with the
Bundesjugendorchestre and conductor Clemens Schuldt.
– Daniel Nelson
