The oratorio April 1876 and the missed trip to Athens (1977–1978)

The choir’s appearances had other dimensions too: in October tourists from East Germany, celebrating their national day at Golden Sands, wrote in the visitors’ book that they had heard “a remarkable choir”, and after the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Georgi Dimitrov shipyard a shipbuilder said he bowed before the singers’ dedication and love of song. On 22 November the choir sang in the concert for the 50th birthdays of the Varna composers Petko Mechkov and Aram Berberyan, including Mechkov’s “Mesechinko” and “Coming of Age”, which he had dedicated to the choir; on 28 and 29 November it sang in the combined programme in honour of October.

On 1 December the full choir began rehearsing Milko Kolarov’s oratorio “April 1876”. Solon Michaelides, a member of the May Competition ’77 jury who had also heard the choir in Cork, invited it informally to a festival in Athens in 1978; on 15 December an official invitation arrived from the choir of the Commercial Bank of Athens to give a non-competitive programme, but permission was needed from the Central House of Amateur Art, and it had not come by the end of the year. From 5 January 1978 the choir rehearsed three times a week for concerts with the guest conductor Vasil Kazandzhiev, Honoured Artist – on 18 February in Varna and in April in Shumen. The city party committee insisted that the choir perform at Varna Summer ’78 an oratorio by Tikhon Khrennikov that had not yet been written – an impossible task while preparing for the National Festival (11 songs each for the mixed and chamber choirs); the board gave a reasoned refusal, and in the end the Central House rejected the idea.

The composer Kolarov followed the rehearsals closely, since some forty musicians and journalists from all over the country would attend the premiere. From 9 February Kazandzhiev took the rehearsals, and his demands differed radically from what the choir had learned; on 13 February came the first rehearsal with the Varna Philharmonic Orchestra at the House of Amateur Art, and on 15 February the mezzo-soprano Neli Bozhkova of the National Opera and Ballet in Sofia and the narrator Boris Lukanov, Honoured Artist, of the Varna Drama Theatre joined them. The evening before the concert Kolarov brought Pancho Vladigerov, People’s Artist, who was keen to hear the first performance. The oratorio filled the second half of the concert, and the librettist Hristo Ganev, the composer, the conductors Kazandzhiev and Chonev and the soloists were called back to the stage again and again. Narodno Delo reported, under the headline “The oratorio April 1876 for the first time in Varna”, that the concert marked the centenary of the Liberation and was broadcast live on the Hristo Botev programme of Bulgarian National Radio.

The second performance in Shumen and a concert in Tolbukhin (Dobrich) were cancelled, but on 3 March the choir sang the third and fourth movements – “Requiem” and “Ode” – in the gala concert at the Drama Theatre. Work began on new songs for the Fifth National Festival – Nikolay Staykov’s “Yovo, le” and “The very first spark” from Al. Tanev’s oratorio “Chronicle of Freedom”. On 14 March Chonev brought bad news from Sofia: the application for Athens, filed on time with the Central House, had never been forwarded – apparently because of personal promises to another choir that met the invitation’s limit of 40 singers. The choir told the organisers it could not accept their invitation and began looking for other choirs for exchange visits.