site.btaFour Choirs to Sing Bulgarian Traditional Songs at Vienna Concert

Four choirs will sing traditional Bulgarian songs at a concert in Vienna on January 27. These are all very different choirs, which will show the audience various styles of performing Bulgarian folk songs, Nina Wasilewa-Zanechev told BTA. She is the leader and conductor of one of the four choirs, the Vienna-based Kitka. The other three are Jagoda, Ensemble Glas and Balgarska Musikalna Palitra.

Among the singers will also be children from the Bulgarian school in the Austrian capital.

The Kitka ensemble was set up as part of an association for traditional Bulgarian music dating back to 2008. Its founders were inspired by a Czech group for traditional dances which visited Vienna a year earlier. "They danced and it was mesmerizing. Then we decided to have our own group for traditional  Bulgarian music and dance in Vienna because by that time there were already enough people, choreographers, dancers and musicians who could join in. We established the Bulgarian Rhythm ensemble, and the Kitka choir came into being as part of it," Wasilewa-Zanechev said.

Kitka now includes several dance groups, including one representative group, as well as children's groups, Kuker mummers and a choir.

In its present form, the choir led by Wasilewa-Zanechev has existed for two years. "We do authentic folk music and when I became the leader we also started doing minor arrangement adjustments," she said.

From time to time Austrians join the choir, as well as people from other nationalities. "They try hard, they are curious. But this kind of singing is very hard for someone who does not have the specific voice. When it gets too difficult for them, they just come to listen," said the choir leader.

Kitka has performed in Munich, Brno, Prague and often gets invited to events in Vienna. It has participated twice in a national convention of Bulgarian traditional music and dance groups from across the world. This year's edition will be in Palma de Majorca and Kitka will be there. 

Wasilewa-Zanechev is working on a show with performances by Bulgarian music and dance groups from Vienna, Linz and Innsbruck. "We are trying to come together and offer a representative music sample of three music regions: Trakia, Western Bulgaria and Northern Bulgaria."

The January 27 concert is actually the closing event in a series of workshop that Wasilewa-Zanechev has organized with Bulgarian bagpipe player, musician and teacher of Bulgarian traditional music Nikolay Balabanov. The two met while she was a student at the Plovdiv Music Academy. "I loved how he worked, I visited the classes he ran in Bulgaria," she said. The two stayed in touch and she invited him to do the singing workshops in Vienna. "He agreed to work with a different choir every day. On Monday it was the oldest choir, made up of mostly Austrian singers. On Tuesday it was another choir with 80% Austrians. On Wednesday it was Kitka and on Thursday he is working with a classical choir which does Bulgarian folk songs and church chants. On Saturday, we want to bring together all four and give a concert to show the audience how Bulgarian folk songs can be performed in different ways."

Kitka's 2024 agenda also includes a stint for the 10th anniversary of the Hungarian cultural centre in Vienna on April 19, then Palma de Majorca in May, a weekend tour of Italy at the invitation of an Italian professor combined with a workshop for Bulgarian traditional singing.

Wasilewa-Zanechev moved to Austria in 1996. She first studied psychology in Salzburg and then moved to Vienna where she studied economics. She returns to Bulgaria occasionally but is in Vienna most of the time. For 14 years, she ran an integration consultancy centre which she set up a year after Bulgaria joined the EU. It closed down during the pandemic in 2022. She has kept business consulting as her day job.

Having taken up music as a hobby, she became more serious about it in the past two years and has enrolled in the ethnomusicology programme of the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts. "It is a researcher's profession, actually," she told BTA.