This program, co-created by one of the leading choral ensembles in the Toulouse region—Ensemble Antiphona under Professor Rolandas Muleika—and the piano duo Sonata and Rokas Zubovas, presents a rich and multilayered dialogue:
between France and Lithuania, between Claude Debussy and Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, between piano and voice, between sound and colour, between the early 20th century and the present day. It also features a world premiere: 7 Reflections by Nijolė Sinkevičiūtė for choir and piano duo (text by Oskaras Milašius).
An indirect dialogue between Debussy and Čiurlionis began as early as 1903, when both composers, unaware of one another, started to work on symphonic compositions about the sea. That year, Debussy began his most monumental symphonic opus La mer, trois esquisses symphoniques pour orchestre (The Sea, Three Symphonic Sketches for Orchestra), while Čiurlionis titled his own epic symphonic poem Jūra (The Sea). Though their aesthetic and cultural perspectives were vastly different, both geniuses turned their artistic attention to the same force of nature—depth and boundlessness—painting with sound the friendship of sun and sea, the dancing and raging of waves, the wind’s might, and its games across the expanse of the water. They told the eternal legend of the sea.
The fates of these two works were starkly different. Debussy’s *La mer*, thanks in part to conductor Arturo Toscanini, became one of the most frequently performed masterpieces of the early 20th century and is considered a landmark in the history of symphonic music. Čiurlionis’s *The Sea*, however, was first performed only in 1936 in Kaunas—25 years after the composer’s death—and then without the organ part he had envisioned and with a substantially revised orchestration. In 1956, composer Eduardas Balsys further “edited” the piece, shortening its climax and altering the orchestration significantly. Only after Lithuania regained independence in 1990 was the process of restoring Čiurlionis’s original version undertaken.
The two Seas had never before been featured in a single concert program. It was only in recent years, thanks to the efforts of Sonata and Rokas Zubovas, that this creative dialogue began to be explored—through piano for four-hands transcriptions performed on stages from South Korea to the United States. In the new program Sea in Radiant Colours, this dialogue expands through the choral music of both composers and the newly commissioned work 7 Reflections by Nijolė Sinkevičiūtė, adding a fresh dimension of synthesis between Lithuanian and French cultures. The piece is based on the cycle Elements by Lithuanian poet and diplomat Oskaras Milašius—a figure whose life and thought embodied the meeting of these two cultural worlds.
