An avid performer on the violin and a champion of contemporary music, Mr. Avramecs has been one of the main organizers of two unofficial New Music festivals in Riga in 1976 and 1977. He is the founder and director of the Riga Early Music Center and the Latvian Oriental Music Center, both of which host festivals respectively of Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music, as well as of Asian and African music.

I spoke with Boriss Avramecs in a cafe in old part of Riga on July 20, 2000, about his diverse musical activities.

ROVNER: Could you tell us about your musical background and surroundings? Where and with whom did your study?

AVRAMECS: I received my preliminary musical education in the well-known music school affiliated with the Latvian Conservatory, where I have studied violin with professor Israel Abramis. He was a pupil of the famous professor of the St. Petersburg Conservatory Metz, who in his turn studied with the famous violinist, Leopold Auer, which made him a direct successor of the St. Petersburg musical traditions of violin playing. Many famous musicians have also studied in this same music school around the same time as I did. Three years prior to when I entered the school, the wonderful violinist Gidon Kremer had graduated from it. Among the other musicians who studied there at the same time as I did, I could name Oleg Kogan, Philip Hirschhorn and Mikhail Maisky as well as the famous dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Alexander Godunov. It was while studying at this school that I first started to become actively interested in contemporary music. This interest had continued during my subsequent studies in the Latvian Conservatory, where I continued my violin studies, and has remained a vital element in my life ever since. At the same time, during my years at the Conservatory, I have been also actively interested in such fields as linguistics, semiotics and Buddhism.

While being a student at the Conservatory, I have begun working in the Latvian Symphony Orchestra, and from my fifth and last years of studies there, I also started to play in the Chamber Ochestra of the Latvian Philharmonia, the conductor of which at that time was Tovi Lifschitz. I have played in the Chamber Orchestra for twenty-two years altogether, excluding the three years that I spent in Moscow, undergoing doctoral studies at Moscow Conservatory.

The Chamber Orchestra of the Latvian Philharmonia was at the time one of the best in the Soviet Union. It has regularly performed in the Large Hall of the Conservatory in Moscow, in the Large Hal of the Philharmonia in Leningrad, and also went on tours abroad. Many famous musicians have performed with us as soloists, among whom I can name Emil Gilels, Daniil Shafran, Natalia Gutman, Vladimir Spivakov, Yuri Bashmet, Gidon Kremer, Oleg Kogan and many others. The repertoire of the Chamber Orchestra was enormous and included Schoenberg’s «Verklaerte Nacht», all of Brten’s pieces for string orchestra including «Simple Symphony» and «Serenata Illuminata», works by Bartok for string and chamber orchestra, Bach’s concertos for violin, for piano as well as the Brandenburg Concerti, not to mention Handel’s «Messiah».

The whole article read in Musician I 2010.