Voices From Abroad: Introduction to the 2003 Festival

This year the concerts of American Music Week in Bulgaria take place at the American University in Blagoevgrad and at Bulgaria Hall, home of the Sofia Philharmonic in the heart of Sofia. The participation of the Philharmonic and its resident chamber ensemble, the Sofia Quartet, are also new features in this year’s programming. We are pleased to welcome an unprecedented number of guest composers and performers from the United States to share their music and talent during the festival.

The theme of this year’s festival, Voices From Abroad, resonates in many ways in the programming. In the opening program, Poets and Personalities, writers lend their voices to their own poetry, which is also “voiced” in the music of others. The second concert, Generation Gaps, includes works by seminal “voices” in American music from the second half of the 19^th century to the present. Toward the New World juxtaposes the familiar “American” quartet composed by the then guest in the New World Antonin Dvorak with works that have never been heard publicly: naturalized American Charles Martin Loeffler’s Historiette No. 2 from 1922 (a musical retelling of scenes from Punch and Judy), and Bulgarian composer Mihail Pekov’s thirteenth quartet. Variations on American introduces Kile Smith’s Voice of One Who Spoke to Bulgaria, premieres Mihail Goleminov’s Lightwaves II, and offers William Schuman’s orchestral “voicing” of Charles Ives’s variations on a tune known to most Americans.

Thanks are due to the more than one hundred composers who responded to our call for scores inspired by American poetry or interpreting “voice”, and to soprano Amy Jarman and composer Petros Ovsepyan for their role in making the final selection (included on the Poets and Personalities concert). The diversity and high quality of the submissions, received from the United States, England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Moldovia, and Kasakhstan, was astounding and made the selection process especially challenging. Thanks also to the Sofia Philharmonic, the Union of Bulgarian Composers, and Vanderbilt and Wake Forest Universities, as well as to the artists themselves, for their generous cooperation and support in making yet another annual edition of American Music Week in Bulgaria possible.

Geoffrey Dean

Founder and Artistic Director

top home