Cork – withdrawal and reversal; the Ninth with Dobrin Petkov (1976)

On 5 January 1976 Chonev announced that the choir would compete in Cork, and from 12 January rehearsals were held four times a week, at first only on the Bulgarian songs. Guessing that the Zoltán Kodály set piece would be his “Carousing Song”, Chonev obtained the score from colleagues and the choir learned it. Petar Vitanov, Yordanka Shishkova and Yanka Mitseva, conductor of the Varna Boys’ Choir, also worked with the sections; Mitseva quickly won the singers over. At the end of January came an invitation to a festival in West Berlin (10–13 June), which the board was willing to accept if the Central House of Folk Art agreed.

The set pieces arrived only in early March – and the Kodály piece turned out to be a different “tavern” song. The programme covered three choirs: the mixed choir would sing Ravel’s “Rondeau”, Tchaikovsky’s “Blessed is he whom Thou hast chosen”, Georgi Dimitrov’s “Lika-prilika” and a “Requiem” attributed to Beethoven; the women, Granville Bantock’s “The Bee”, Kodály’s “Mountain Nights” and N. Staykov’s “Kalugerine”; the men, Edward MacDowell’s “Dance of the Gnomes”, Kodály’s tavern song and Zdravko Manolov’s “Dilmano, Dilbero”. Most of the foreign pieces had to be sung in English, so the board asked by telegram for permission to sing the Kodály and Tchaikovsky in the original.

Around mid-February came the shock: the Central House of Folk Art refused permission for West Berlin, and Cork reported that for financial reasons it could take only 50 singers. When this was confirmed in writing, the board withdrew from the competition without hesitation, and the chairman, Nino Ninov, went to Sofia to explore a tour of Bulgaria’s southern neighbours or the USSR instead. The intensive rehearsals stopped and work began on Beethoven’s Ninth with the Plovdiv Philharmonic under Dobrin Petkov, who held to the agreed programme – the first rehearsal with him was on 26 February.

On 1 March 1976, declared Amateur Artists’ Day for the first time, at a celebration in Varna’s Palace of Culture and Sports Morski Zvutsi was named the best amateur choir in the country and received the Special Award of the Committee for Art and Culture and 2,000 leva; the singer Arsen Torosyan was also honoured. On 9 March came the rehearsal with the Romanian soloists Emilia Petrescu, Marta Kessler, Florin Diaconescu and Gheorghe Crăsnaru, again with Vitanov at the piano. In Plovdiv Petkov was at first unhappy with the tired voices, but at the next rehearsal he said: “This is a different choir altogether.” The concert on 21 March played to a packed hall, with people standing and visitors from Sofia.

On 25 March came the reversal: the Cork organisers had refused the other Bulgarian choirs offered to them, insisted on Morski Zvutsi and changed the rules to accept the whole choir. First, though, on 27 March the choir had to give the closing concert of the Ruse March Music Days ’76 – the Ninth with the Plovdiv orchestra under Petkov. The hall was packed to bursting, the concert was broadcast on Bulgarian Television’s second channel, and staff from Radio Sofia declared it the finest performance of the symphony they had ever heard.