Juris Abols: Xeniae

This album is a rather unusual world premiere of an opera that exists only as a recording. LRK's artistic director Sigvards Klava recalls a following encounter: "Abols brought over a bucket filled with sheets of music, and it took him a week of sorting them all out to put the opera score in the correct order. Sometimes he wasn't even sure which direction to hold the paper in order to read the music. I mean, truly splendid! We did the recording in the summer of 2010 in the basement of my house. Abols basically lived with us for that whole time and was present at almost all of the recording sessions. The singers arrived alone, or sometimes in pairs, and he tried to explain to each one the type of character they were to portray. We spent about a month and a half on the project. He also played his soprano saxophone; that was his vaunted psychodelia (and no, he didn't say 'psychedelia', as would be correct). When it came to jazz licks, he liked to play the walking bass, because it's impossible to mess up.