Ten days in Poland (1970)

At the start of 1970 a good number of men left the choir, weakening the men’s ensemble and especially the basses. The women, however, kept working at full strength, and the chamber choir showed real class, counting among the favourites at the Golden Diana chamber choir festival in Yambol.

The season ended with a ten-day tour of Poland at the invitation of the student choir of the Gdańsk Polytechnic – Gdańsk being Varna’s twin city. The choir gave five concerts and recorded all three of its ensembles for radio, and Baltic Radio broadcast a programme about it. The board met representatives of Polish public life in Warsaw.

Lyuba Lipova and Maria Dimitrova described the tour. The first concert was in Warsaw, in the conservatory’s Gama hall, before diplomats from the Bulgarian and Soviet embassies, musicians and the public; the programme included “Hubava si, tatkovino”, Todor Popov’s “Invasion” and Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, and the choir appeared as mixed, chamber and women’s ensembles. Next came a concert at the packed Officers’ House in Malbork – applause, encores and flowers – and in Gdańsk the choir sang four times. Audiences were struck by the sonority, the fresh voices and the musical culture of the performances; the Polish song “On the Other Side of the River”, learned with great care, drew an enthusiastic response. The credit went to the conductors Marin Chonev and Dimitar Demirov and the accompanist Petar Vitanov.

The Polish press noticed the visit too. A review by Romuald Gojżewski, reproduced in the book, presented the choir as a 100-strong ensemble with a 33-member chamber choir, holder of the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, 1st class, with more than 200 concerts under Chonev’s baton, and called its concert the event of the season at the Baltic Philharmonic. The singers came home with new friendships and an invitation to host the Gdańsk choir on a Varna stage.