The 1990–1991 season: Brahms with Pierre Cao and an invitation to southern France

The new season began at the end of September 1990. The main task was the concert for the choir’s 35th anniversary, planned for April 1991; Mr Cornelou’s help would also be sought for another tour of France. A weakness was the small number of singers – most of them new and inexperienced – so they attended extra sessions with the conductors. The first appearances came quickly: on 5 October the choir sang for the delegates of a philosophers’ congress, and on 1 November at the opening of the season and the Day of the National Awakeners at the House of Amateur Arts.

In early December a sponsor invited the choir to give concerts in Odesa in April 1991, with the singers paying only their travel. With inflation rising, the board judged that the singers would hardly agree, and declined. An offer from Shumen to perform the Ninth Symphony was also turned down: the hosts would pay only the conductor, leaving the singers’ travel and daily expenses to the choir, which had no such money – and it was not right for singers to pay for the pleasure they gave audiences elsewhere.

For the Christmas matinee the choir revived Beethoven’s Mass in C major. From 20 December it worked with the conductor Deyan Pavlov from Ruse, and on 25 December 1990 at the Festival Complex, with soloists Nikolina Pankova, Lyudmila Doreva, Dimitar Kyurkchiev and Stoyan Stoyadzhev and the Varna Symphony Orchestra, the concert became a “double celebration” for the audience. In early 1991 friends from Karditsa, Greece, agreed to a visit only if the choir sang Mozart’s Requiem and half of Verdi’s; the latter was not in the repertoire, and Brahms’s German Requiem had to be revived, so the trip was dropped.

The German Requiem was programmed at the Varna Summer festival under Pierre Cao, and the choir alone would carry the entire choral part. Cao checked in advance whether the small choir could hold its own against the orchestra and received Chonev’s assurance. Meanwhile, on 7 April 1991, the choir gave an Easter matinee: Mozart’s Mass in C major under Chonev, with Anna Varbanova at the organ, and Church Slavonic music conducted by Rositsa Shtereva.

During the May Choral Competition, on 12 May, Mr Cornelou from France met the singers and proposed that they take part in a festival in southern France in 1992. He mentioned Shostakovich’s oratorio “Song of the Forests”, but once he learned that parts of it were awkward under the new political conditions, he was offered Rachmaninov’s “The Bells”, which the choir had recorded on disc almost twenty years earlier, and given a copy of the record. The work was included in the festival programme, but this option later fell through. On 5 July 1991, at Varna Summer ’91, the German Requiem under Cao was a great success.

In 1992 the repertoire was built around the expected tour of France – Dobri Hristov’s Liturgy and works by Western composers. On 12 July Yordan Dafov conducted the Ninth Symphony with the choir and the Varna Symphony Orchestra, with soloists Mariya Belcheva, Aleksandrina Milcheva, Arseniy Arsov and Aleksandar Krulev, and the packed hall of the Festival and Congress Centre did not hold back its superlatives for the choir.