(Kiev, October 28, 1909 - Riga, March 20, 2000)
Born in Kiev in 1909 in the Latvian skipper family Peter Skulte (1875–1967) and his wife Victoria, born Rizzolatti. His mother's father was the Italian sculptor Pietro Ricolati, older brother of the composer Bruno Skulte (1905-1976). After the end of the Russian civil war in 1922, his family moved to Latvia. He studied at the line 1st Gymnasium, where he graduated in 1928 and began to study at the engineering faculty of the University of Latvia.
In 1930 he began to study composition at the Latvia Conservatory and in 1931 he stopped studying at the University of Latvia. In 1933 he worked as a music teacher at Balvi Gymnasium, where he directed the mixed choir of the students and the piano department of the Popular University of Balvi. In 1934, the Skulte symphonic poem "Vilnius" won a prize in the competition of symphonic works organized by the radio line, for which Skulte received a prize of 500 Lats. After graduating from the practical composition class in 1936, Jāzeps Vītols invited him to teach composition and theoretical subjects at the Latvia Conservatory. Adolf Skulte married in 1937 and in 1939 a son was born, Guido Skulte, in the Adolf and Helena Skulte family, who later became director of photography.
During the Second World War in 1944, his parents and brothers fled to Germany as refugees, but Adolf Skulte and his family remained in Latvia. Skulte has long directed the Conservatory composition department (1948–1955, 1957–1972). In 1952 he was elected professor at the Conservatory. From 1952 to 1956, Skulte was president of the Union of Latvian composers. He was also a deputy of the Supreme Council of the RSLS.
He died in 2000, and was buried in the Forestry Cemetery of the PAULS Stradiņš University Clinical Hospital on March 20, 2006.
The work in three movements has a connection with traditional symphonic forms, but extends with a fantastic and beautiful brutality. The beginning of slow is calm, awaits its time slowly, building, growing and making a profound use of its darkness. The orchestral palette is vast and really shows a composer who launches everything he has now that he has the freedom to do it. The splendid melodies of the arches juxtaposed to dark monolithic agreements in brass make the experience intense. The parallelisms with Honnegger are particularly accurate, the similarities between this symphony and the Honnegger's Symphonie liturgique are there, but never in a pastic way.
The cheerful with Brio flies. There are no other words for this. The pure energy and the push in the work never really stop. It is a surprise that the conductor does not have a repetitive point or effort from this passage. However, it probably ends in the most brazen way you could imagine.
The end, slow - alive, is rich and powerful. It stands as the largest movement of the work, but it could also be seen as two rushed movements together since the conductor has noticed that slow and vivo should be performed without interruption. This according to slowly begins with a glorious color haze. The accumulation of the agreement recalls the berg violin concert, but in its own way it is equally dense and delicious; Like a truly masterful hot chocolate. The saxophone solo is disturbing and simply divine. The accumulation is intense and only glorious things that ears can testify. The moment when the tubular bell sounds is magnificent and the harmonies that respond are stunned to me. Vivo begins fleetingly, with voices that enter one by one, and like the cheerful with their brio they fly. Skulte has a magnificent ability to write fast music, an art disappeared in the previous century. The ending has a real feeling of a shape, with its return segments and the way the movement dance elegantly between them is simply masterful. And the recapitulation of the melody at the height of the movement is as glorious as it is terrifying.
Symphony is simply magnificent, there is no doubt. The width and size within a symphonic work is amazing, not to mention the other eight symphonies. This is a composer who simply needs to be listened to more.
