The Bulgarian National Philharmonic Choir will first sing Toprak Sever İnsanları Birer Birer (‘Earth Loves People One By One’), a newly-commissioned work by the contemporary Turkish composer Hasan Uçarsu. Then the Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Aziz Shokhakimov, will accompany the choir in the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor by the Russian composer Alexander Borodin.
Hasan Uçarsu, born in Istanbul in 1965, carried out doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1994 to 1997. He 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 depicts ‘a more just and balanced life in harmony with nature’.
Although Alexander Borodin (1833-1887) worked on his opera Prince Igor for 18 years, it remained unfinished at his death, and was completed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov. Fortunately, Borodin had completed the orchestration of the Polovtsian Dances before he died. ‘Polovtsy’ was the word used by the medieval Rus for the Kipchaks and the Comans – Turkic nomads who had migrated from Central Asia, forming a confederation in the western part of the Eurasian Steppe between the 10th and 13th centuries.
The Bulgarian National Philharmonic Choir, founded in 1944, is formed of professional singers who have graduated from the Bulgarian Academy of Music.
The Tekfen Philharmonic Orchestra, meanwhile, is conducted by Aziz Shokhakimov, born in Tashkent in 1988. In 2016, he jointly won the Herbert von Karajan Young Conductors’ Award, given during the Salzburg Festival. Between 2015 and 2021 he was Kapellmeister at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein.
Issue 67, December 2024
Beauty in the Wilderness
