State Opera Stara Zagora Choir presents the music of Great Britain

On 12 March at 19.00 on the stage of the Opera House the Choir of the State Opera-Stara Zagora under the conductorship of the choirmaster Mladen Stanev will open the "Music without Borders" cycle with the concert "Classics and Jazz from Great Britain". In a series of concerts the audience will have the opportunity to meet both familiar and rarely performed works by composers from all over the world, from different eras and styles. The first concert is dedicated to the music of Great Britain. Benjamin Britten's cantata "Rejoice in the Lamb" and Nidaros Jazz Mass by Bob Chilcott will be performed.

The concert "Classics and Jazz from Great Britain"

Choirmaster Mladen Stanev on the "birth" of the idea, the choice of works and their musical content and universal message, so what the audience's expectations might be:

"Difficult times for the musicians and the audience gave the opportunity to realize an independent choral concert with a chamber focus - long conceived by the management of the Stara Zagora Opera. The initiative for this particular challenge came from the deputy director and director Slavcho Nikolov, who has long been involved in singing. He provided a donation from an American university library - scores for the choir, some of which are unknown in our country.

We stopped at "Rejoice in the Lamb", a festive cantata written after the poem by Christopher Smart, a poet who lived in the 18th century. The verses are filled with religious devotion and resemble the structure of the biblical scriptures, but they express the understanding and attitude of man from his point of view - the child's gaze, the suffering, the rapture, and the delight in the highest harmony.

Britten has assembled these verses into a secular work that formally corresponds to canonical religious works, resembling them - through the accompaniment of the organ, the meaning of the individual parts, and the cyclical nature of the whole - prayers, praise, suffering and crucifixion, rest and eternity - the attainment of perfection.

Britten created a musical masterpiece in which he succeeded in expressing in a short time the inexhaustible world of musical sensations. The serenity and mysticism at the beginning are varied with narrative-illustrative pictures, a sideways look at other living creatures and their significance. Suffering and redemption follow, to lead cleverly to the climax - the insight that music is the greatest way to express the divine. A title in which the supremacy of music is declared with ecstasy, with celebratory fireworks. Something of a supreme revelation followed by the soothing ecstatic praise and intoxication written in motet form at the finale.

It was this work's celebration of music as the perfection that unites man and the divine that won me over to its creative realization on our stage. To make the concert even more interesting and varied, we added a jazz medley by contemporary English author Robert (Bob) Chilcott, written nearly 80 years after Britten's cantata. The mass was composed for the musicians of the beautiful medieval cathedral of Nidaros, which retains the name of the old Norwegian capital in today's city of Trondheim. The city is rich in spiritual and national traditions, the first centre of the Protestant Christian community in these lands. It is written according to the canonical rules of the Western European Christian musical tradition, but with the free and super-universal language of jazz, the contemporary sound and feel, understood and loved in England, by the Nordic peoples and by us all.

Choral works for jazz are rare, as this genre lives on through the individual improvisational element in the musician's soul. Chilcott, who has devoted his life to this art as a performer and writer, manages to masterfully bring together the complexity and lightness in the feel of this music and entrust them to the choral ensemble.

The concert will provide an opportunity to compare two works by English composers, different in style and character, but uniting the idea of the music's feeling as a divine language, accessible and belonging to the human voice. A language that, without borders and without obstacles, connects man to the highest power, as well as us humans to each other."

All anti-epidemic measures will be observed during the concert!

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