Baltic Souls – Jan Brokken

In more than thirty concert halls from Amsterdam to Strasbourg: pianist Marcel Worms, violinist Ursula Schoch and author Jan Brokken have presented their lecture-concert Baltic Souls, inspired by Baltische zielen, lotgevallen in Estland, Letland en Litouwen (Baltic Souls, fifteen families in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.). In that book, Jan Brokken describes the history of the three Baltic countries by chronicling fifteen families who flourished within the last 150 years. Families including such remarkable talents as the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, father and son Eisenstein from Riga, writer Romain Gary from Vilnius, Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, painter Mark Rothko from Daugavpils, the philosopher Hannah Arendt from Königsberg, the Lithuanian composer Jurgis Gaiþauskas, but also far less well-known or forgotten families like that of the bookseller Jânis Roze in Riga or the barons Von Wrangel from Estonia.