V International Joseph Achron Music Festival | Festival Closing Concert

American composer Michael Gordon’s piece “Travel Guide to Nicaragua” is a compelling musical journey of memory, where personal family history merges with the broader 20th-century theme of Jewish migration, loss, and survival.

Michael Gordon is one of today’s most prominent creators of contemporary American music, co-founder and artistic director of the legendary New York collective “Bang on a Can”. His music brings together the energy of minimalism, intense rhythm, powerful sonic dramaturgy, and the pulse of the modern world. In “Travel Guide to Nicaragua”, the composer looks back at his family’s path from the town of Zhetel through Cuba and Nicaragua to the United States. It is not only a geographical journey but also a sensitive narrative about memory, loss, identity, and connection with the past. The choral voices, cello, and the visual narrative layer created by Laurie Olinder combine here into a concentrated contemporary music experience. Olinder is a New York multimedia artist, co-founder of Ridge Theater, who has collaborated with creators such as Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe.

The piece will be performed by one of Lithuania’s finest vocal ensembles — the Vilnius City Municipality Choir “Jauna Muzika”, led by conductor and composer Vaclovas Augustinas, and cellist Gleb Pyšniak, who performs in the world’s most famous halls and actively presents Litvak and contemporary music.

This is a concert about a journey that begins in family history but speaks in the universal language of memory, loss, and survival.