Maribor celebrates music with September festival

The well known Slovenian folk group Terrafolk are not a folk group in the traditional sense. They consider the popular image of folk music as boring and twist it on its head. In 2003 they won a BBC3 World Music Audience Award. This year Terrafolk is participating in the music festival "September" which is currently underway in Slovenia's second largest city in Maribor.

The festival has quite a tradition. It is organised by the cultural department of the Narodni dom in Maribor. Brigita Pavlic is the head of concert management:

"We present new projects, premieres of project authors like the internationally recognised Slovenian choir conductor Carmina Silec or Bojan Cvetreznik, who connected the well known folk group Terrafolk with the chamber orchestra in an interesting project that explores and somehow translates the idea of chamber music from the past to nowadays creativity of musical artists from different fields, including contemporary music but also popular music trends."

And what is the essence of the festival as it is not strictly a festival of classical music but it is somehow a fusion of styles. This year Slovenian artists dominate as Brigita Pavlic explains:

"The essence of the latest musical September is creativity- here and now- and this is also the reason why a lot of Slovenian artists hold the reins of this year's festival."

But the festival does also take care of the younger audience. The organisers of the festival are aware of the fact that it is important to educate children and young adults and to bring music closer to them - one way of doing that is offering workshops to play with children's creativity as Brigita Pavlic explains:

"We do present an interesting musical performance for kids 'all about music' with Jure Ivanusic and Marko Vezovisek, there will be also workshops for kids about improvisation and composing for young musicians and of course a lot of other let's say more classical concerts, like e.g. with the world famous violinist Gerard Causse then a concert with the piano duo Milko Lazar and Bojan Gorisek. We will hear the Slovenian born trombone player Branimir Slokar this time with his daughter Zora Slokar on horn and the German organ player Clemens Schnorr as well as many other interesting concerts and performances."

The mix of different music styles, excellent performances and innovation seems to be the key to success for the music festival September.