Everyone has something that they are afraid of. For Anna Ķirse, that something happened to be almost everything. But facing the realization that fear might prevent her from pursuing her dreams, Anna was able to turn fear into her ally, helping her push herself to work hard enough to achieve her goal of making it in the world of music. Along the way, she realized that fear was not a liability but a powerful emotion that can be harnessed into a creative force. And it was alone in the Finnish forest and surrounded by her perceived fears that Anna let her imagination run wild, allowing her create the utterly unique opera in the forest, “Tree opera.”
Anna Ķirse is regarded as one of the brightest young composers in Latvia. Her work flourishes outside the walls of conventional concert halls and crosses the boundaries of different genres. Anna’s most recent opera, ‘’Tree Opera. Wind Throws.’’, premiered in August in Finland and has been hailed as a phenomenon of both culture and nature. Her achievements have not gone unnoticed. Her composition ‘’Radices” represented Latvia in the prestigious international contest ‘’Rostrum,” she was nominated for the Latvian Contemporary Art Prize – the Purvītis Prize, and received the Latvian Academy of Music and LMT Annual Award for outstanding achievements in music and creativity. She has just finished her master’s degree in composition at the Latvian Academy of Music and is currently working on commissions by the Icelandic ensemble ‘’Nordic Affect’’, the Swedish Paetzold flute player Anna Petrini and on a composition for the State Choir Latvia that’s set to premiere next year in Switzerland.