At the bottom of this text you have the recording of Arvo Pärt Lamentate for piano and orchestra, performed on 28th of February 2019, with Niš Symphony Orchestra and Jose Luis Martinez as director, being this piece's Balkan premiere. It cannot be published at any other platform because of the copyright contract.

I have discovered it in November 2017 and since then I knew that was the next music piece that was the only option to play with orchestra in next occasion. After long and complicated negotiation, the direction of the orchestra has accepted the challenge, which by them and all the local press has been recognized as a step to the future of this city governed orchestra and the whole city. They accepted it one month and the half before the concert, asked me to pay for the score rental and the copyright fees, and to be prepared not to be able to receive neither the refund nor the honorary and trip expenses before the end of 2019, and even that only in the case that the city council allows the payment. I had gladly done that, because it was personally very important for me and I trusted the capacity of the director that he would manage to do everything he could in order to not leave the payment in my hands. The score arrived to us two weeks before the concert and eventually, the city council decided to do the whole payment the day before the concert. Unfortunately, we were not able to dispose of the full percussion group at the day of the concert.

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Being able to perform this has helped me in my personal research for the universal empathy: before taking any action, whoever/whatever is in front me, to think what he thinks, feel what he feels, why he appeared - why we got to the same place or time, and then take the step, being, at the end, me myself the first whose feelings, thoughts and the reason of those two being able to meet, and consequently take an action that by embracing all the world responsibly returns to me responsibly.

 

Mr Pärt has said about Lamentate:

"The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’."

"My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. Suddenly, I found myself put into a position in which my life appeared in a different light. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me."

"I have written a lamento – not for the dead, but for the living."

"Anish Kapoor's sculpture shatters not only concepts of space, but also – in my view – concepts of time. The boundary between time and timelessness no longer seems so important."

"The composition cannot really be described as a typical piano concerto. I chose the piano to be the solo instrument because it fixes our attention on something that is "one".

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LAMENTATE RECORDING

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