Touring Italy with the Ninth Symphony (1973)

In mid-October 1973 the Ninth Symphony was set aside for a few days for a joint concert with the Shumen orchestra under Filip Lambrev – Cherubini’s Requiem once more. After a single rehearsal with the orchestra on 19 October, the Shumen concert went very well, and the audience and the local Rodni Zvutsi choir wished the Varna singers success in Italy. Meanwhile passports and visas were arranged, and on 27–28 October came the first rehearsal with the soloists Rumyana Bareva (soprano), Gabriela Schubert-Traykova (mezzo-soprano), Pavel Kurshumov (tenor) and Stoyan Popov (baritone) under Ruslan Raychev, with Petar Vitanov at the piano. The final route took in Naples (two concerts), Messina, Palermo, Benevento (two concerts), Terni, Bergamo, Vercelli, St. Moritz in Switzerland and Ravenna. The choir left Varna on 31 October.

The start in Naples was worrying: at the first joint rehearsal the voices were out of shape, it dragged on for three hours, and the singers went to the concert disheartened. On stage, though, they were transformed – after Cherubini’s Requiem the hall burst into applause, and after Rachmaninov’s “The Bells” the audience was ecstatic and demanded encores. In the Basilica of Santa Maria in Messina the singers coped with the treacherous echo, and the conductor was congratulated personally by the cardinal. At the Teatro Biondo in Palermo the Ninth Symphony drew an endless standing ovation.

In Benevento the first concert, in the Complesso monumentale San Francesco, played to a half-empty hall, but the second – after a successful second concert in a new hall in Naples – was packed, with people standing in the aisles and applause coming even from behind the singers, from a niche high above the stage. In Terni, in the church of San Francesco, the choir was surprised to see among the applauding audience Piero Adorno – the Italian conductor with whom Cherubini’s Requiem had earlier gone badly in Varna; he had come specially, and now voiced his delight.

On 11 November in Bergamo, Donizetti’s home town, the audience applauded as soon as the curtain rose, and this was the only place where the symphony’s finale was repeated as an encore; at the stage door young people shook the singers’ hands, and girls said “Grazie, signor!” for badges from the May Choral Festival. Then came a warmly received concert in Vercelli, a refined audience at the theatre in St. Moritz and a final concert in Ravenna. At the end, in St Mark’s Square in Venice, the singers joined Pio Capone and his friends in “Rodna pesen” and “Hubava si, tatkovino”. The tour went into the choir’s history with the applause of hundreds of Italians and warm press reviews of the joint concerts of Morski Zvutsi and the Plovdiv Symphony Orchestra.