Wednesday saw the opening concert of the 2025 İKSV Istanbul Music Festival, which this year, the 53rd, has taken the theme, ‘Beyond Borders’. (Photo: the Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra, by Salih Üstündağ). After the speeches, the lucky recipients of this year's awards were announced. First up was the young Turkish violinist Bade Daştan (born 2007).

^{The voilinist Bade Daştan with the Festival Director Yeşim Gürer Oymak (photo: Salih Üstündağ)}

^{Photo: Kaupo Kikkas}

The other recipients were the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov, now resident in Berlin (a new work by him entitled Moments of Memory V is due to be performed at the Süreyya Opera House on June 16);

and the Turkish opera singer and singing teacher Mesut İktu. Mr İktu did not, unfortunately, appear to be in very good health, but he did manage to deliver an acceptance speech during which he said that his career had been an attempt on his part to repay his debt to Atatürk – a statement that drew prolonged applause from the audience.

The music began with a performance by the Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bulgarian National Philharmonic Choir, under the baton of the orchestra’s Uzbek conductor Aziz Shokhakimov, of *Toprak Sever İnsanları Birer Birer* (‘Earth Loves People One By One’), a newly-commissioned work by the contemporary Turkish composer Hasan Uçarsu. Prof. Uçarsu, born in Istanbul in 1965, carried out doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 1997, and is currently a professor in the Department of Composition and Orchestral Conducting at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Istanbul State Conservatoire. *Toprak Sever İnsanları Birer Birer* is a setting of a poem by Fazıl Hüsnü Dağlarca (1914-2008) that is intended to depict ‘a more just and balanced life in harmony with nature’.

A great deal of improvement has taken place in Prof. Uçarsu’s compositional style since I heard a performance of his *Davetsiz Misafirler* (‘Uninvited Guests’) by the Tekfen Orchestra at the Hagia Irene Museum several years ago. His orchestration is now vastly improved; in particular, I found his use of bells very entertaining. Another highly positive development is the addition of a strong rhythmic element to his music. I was also impressed by the quality of his choral writing, though I thought some of the chorus’s entries were rather difficult for the singers: the chorus needed clearer ‘cues’ from the orchestra if they were to come in on the right notes. If I may make so bold as to offer a suggestion, what I think he now needs to concentrate on is his handling of longer forms: instead of piecing together a medley of bits of this and bits of that, he needs to make his longer works ‘hang together’ by creating longer sections in contrasting moods that give the work as a whole a recognisable structure.

One final word: the orchestra were sometimes permitted to obscure the choir, and the harmonisation of the Turkish folk song material that occurred towards the end needed to escape from the all-too-familiar strategies (such as open fourths and gradual chromatic descents) that were over-used by Turkish composers of the inter-war period. Prof. Uçarsu has the originality to create interesting harmonies, and I would like to see him do so in his treatment of traditional Turkish folk music.  

The second, and final, work on the programme was the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin (1833-87). Borodin, the illegitimate son of a Georgian nobleman, was in fact a doctor and chemist who contributed to several important discoveries in the field of chemistry. A promoter of education in Russia, he founded the School of Medicine for Women in St Petersburg, where he taught until 1885. These professional duties naturally prevented him from spending much time composing, though he did find the time to write (among other things) two symphonies, two highly-regarded string quartets and the symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia as well as the opera Prince Igor, which he worked on for a full 18 years. Fortunately, although this last work remained unfinished at his death (it was completed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov), he had completed the orchestration of the Polovtsian Dances before he died – suddenly, while he was at a ball. These highly rhythmic dances are somewhat primitive, even atavistic, in nature, being intended to convey Russian ideas as to what the music of Turkic tribes sounded like: ‘Polovtsy’ was in fact the word used by the medieval Rus for the Kipchaks and Comans – Turkic nomads who had migrated to southern Russia from Central Asia, forming a confederation in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe between the 10th and 13th centuries.

It was with the Polovtsian Dances that the Bulgarian National Philharmonic Choir, an ensemble formed of professional singers who have graduated from the Bulgarian Academy of Music, really came into their own: throughout the previous work, which was both new to them and also (it must be said) not particularly easy to sing, they had been somewhat hesitant. Conductor Aziz Shokhakimov jumped around energetically on the podium, and the musicians (especially the brass department) gave it everything they had. The entries were spot-on, and the choir, who must have known this piece well, magnificent; all in all, it was a banging (this being a new colloquialism that appears to mean ‘excellent’) opening to a much-anticipated musical feast.

In conclusion, I must thank Ms Elif Ekinci and Ms Eda Göknar of the İKSV for providing me with a complimentary ticket at the last moment (I gave them very little warning of my intention to attend). I must also register my gratitude to the İKSV itself, an organisation that – fortunately for us – has been able to keep going without interruption since its foundation by Nejat F Eczacıbaşı in 1973, and to the Festival sponsors for their essential contributions to our pleasure and enjoyment. I very much hope that this year’s Festival concludes without mishap, and that everyone is able to go home safely, with blissful bagatelles and ballads still resounding in their elated ears.

PS A note of advice when choosing your seat at the AKM: The complimentary seat I had been graciously accorded by the İKSV was right at the back of the auditorium, and past experience had led me to believe that from this position it would be next to impossible to hear what was going on on the stage. (On one occasion last year, I deliberately chose a seat in a corner at the back in order to test the acoustics, and found them to be – let’s be kind – somewhat unsatisfactory.) This time, however, I did not draw an auditory blank, but was able to hear most of what was being said during the initial speeches. I surmise that this was because I was not sitting in a corner. The moral of this story: stay in the middle section of the auditorium and you’ll hear OK, however far back you may be.

Photographs: IKSV / Salih Üstündağ