site.btaVarna Summer Festival 2023 Scientific Symposium Dedicated to Spanish Music

The scientific symposium of the International Music Festival Varna Summer 2023 is dedicated to the Spanish musical tradition. The fifth edition of the forum will take place from September 1 to 3 with the participation of world names in musicology from Spain, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria, the festival's press office informed.

The discussion topics will be illustrated with musical excerpts. The three evening concerts in the City Art Gallery of Varna will also be dedicated to them. The first will present performances by the Baroque and Renaissance group Armonica stanza. The second evening will feature Bulgarian and European musicians with piano masterpieces of chamber music by Enrique Granados, Enrique Fernandez Arbos, Joaquin Turina and Pablo Sarasate. In the third concert, the audience will be transported from the Romantic to the contemporary by the Enseic ensemble from Cantabria.

Each year, the festival organizers choose a theme that resonates with its concert programme. This year it is linked to Spain, which has taken over the Presidency of the Council of the EU. The forum will introduce the residents and guests of Varna to the tradition and universality of Spanish music from the Baroque to the present day. The individual panels are entitled "Spanish Baroque Music", "Nationalism and Universalism in Spanish Music" and "Identity and Development". The academic moderator will be Prof. Dr. Hartmut Krones from the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, assisted by Dr. Petya Tsvetanova from the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music.

According to the artistic director of the festival prof. Mario Hossen, the scientific symposium enjoys growing interest from researchers from Europe, and in the discussions the visiting luminaries of musicology and their Bulgarian colleagues come to significant conclusions and discoveries. He recalled that after the 2019 meeting, interesting moments from the correspondence between Robert Schumann, Clara Wieck and Johannes Brahms were discussed, which subsequently became the occasion for a major symposium in Vienna. German Romance was the theme of the scientific sessions in Varna in 2022. Such encounters inspire people, the human mind, enchanted by inspiration and nature, reaches revelations that actually have their reflection in the history of music, says Hossen.