Winter Newsletter 2024
HAPPY HOLIDAYS
On behalf of the performers, composers, and behind-the-scenes team of the Off the Beaten Path Festival, I wish you and your families a happy and delightful Holiday Season!
As we end this year, we reflect on our deep gratitude for your support and our shared love for Bulgaria. Thank you for making our dreams come true in these adventurous years! Together, we have established one of the most beloved music festivals in the country and have managed to create a powerful community of volunteers and like-minded people in support of important causes like the preservation of the Cultural Center in Kovachevitsa, our Educational Outreach initiatives, and our residency and commissioning program for composers.
We are thrilled to share with you a new documentary video by Insieme (Damian Stefanov and Stela Stoykova) about our Composers’ Residency in Kovachevitsa. It features interviews and a behind-the-scenes look at the process of commissioning and working with our Bulgarian composers, Lora Al-Ahmad, Peter Kerkelov, and Svetlin Hristov. We hope you will enjoy it and continue joining our creative community in 2025 as we develop our programs in Kovachevitsa and beyond!
With warm wishes for peace and joy,
Lora Tchekoratova, President
Off the Beaten Path Foundation
SAVE THE DATES
A Preliminary Look at Our Seventh Edition
July 30, 2025
Cultural Center, Gotse Delchev
July 31, 2025
Dimitar Blagoev Community Center, Dobrinishte
August 1–3, 2025
Svetlina Community Center, Kovachevitsa
August 8–9, 2025
Hristo Karpachev Community Center, Karpachevo/p>
Tickets and the full program will be available in March 2025
In the summer of 2025, the Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival will expand its activities with additional events in Dobrinishte and Garmen (both in South-Western Bulgaria) and in Karpachevo (North-Central Bulgaria) and will again present programs in the town of Gotse Delchev and the village of Kovachevitsa.
Following the success of the new works we commissioned and presented to Bulgarian audiences in 2023-2024, our concert programs will continue to focus on creating new compositions for the festival's musicians and presenting Bulgarian premieres of composers from around the world.
Each premiere will combine specially selected masterpieces from the classical chamber repertoire. We plan to work with composers Valentin Sylvestrov (Ukraine) and Kenji Bunch (USA) and introduce a work by Bulgarian-American composer Henri Lazarov (1932-2013), who is not well known in Bulgaria. We will continue collaborating with composers Dobrinka Tabakova and Petеr Kerkelov by presenting their compositions in new venues.
Our special guest artists include world-renowned musicians Karin Dornbusch, clarinet (Sweden/Switzerland), Monica Ohuchi, piano (USA), and Stefan Arzberger, violin (Germany).
We will again organize the Singing Hearts music camp for children from Southwestern Bulgaria, led by Mariana Karpatova. The camp will take place in the town of Gotse Delchev. The programs will include concerts at the Gotse Delchev Park and the town's retirement home and a special festival concert for the region's children. This time, the concert will take place at the Iskra 1924 Community Center in Garmen.
HIGHLIGHTS 2025
Kenji Bunch
composer
Kenji Bunch writes music that looks for commonalities between musical styles, for understandings that transcend cultural or generational barriers, and for empathic connections with his listeners. Drawing on vernacular musical traditions, an interest in highlighting historical injustices and inaccuracies, and techniques from his classical training, Bunch creates music with a unique personal vocabulary that appeals to performers, audiences, and critics alike.
With his work frequently performed worldwide and recorded numerous times, Bunch considers his current mission the search for and celebration of shared emotional truths about the human experience from the profound to the absurd to help facilitate connection and healing through entertainment, vulnerability, humor, and joy. Mr. Bunch is widely recognized for performing his groundbreaking works for viola. He currently serves as Artistic Director of the new music group Fear No Music and is deeply committed to music education in his hometown of Portland, Oregon.
Valentin Silvestrov
composer
Born in Kyiv in 1937, the Ukrainian composer and pianist Valentin Silvestrov was one of the leading figures of the Soviet musical avant-garde in the 1960s. Silvestrov turned to musical experimentation early in his career, with his works finding limited recognition in the Soviet Union. In 1974, he came under pressure to conform to the prescriptions of socialist realism and defend his departure from a composers' meeting in protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He withdrew from public life for a period and gradually changed his style. In 1997, he composed Quiet Songs, a cycle intended for performance in private settings.
He is the author of nine symphonies, three string quartets, the symphonic poem for piano and orchestra, Metamusic and Dedication for violin and orchestra, Requiem for Larissa for choir and orchestra, and other works. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Silvestrov turned to sacred and religious themes, composing music influenced by Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox liturgical music. In the 21st century, he has worked in small forms, writing more than six hundred pieces, mostly for piano, including waltzes, lullabies, pastorals, serenades, and more. In 2022, after the Russian invasion, Silvestrov left Ukraine and moved to Berlin.
Henri Lazarof
composer
Henri Lazarof was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1932. His first music lessons were with the Jesuit Lycee Francais. By his teenage years, he was already a concert pianist and was beginning to study musical composition. After World War II, he left Bulgaria with his family to emigrate to Palestine and studied composition with Paul Ben-Haim in Jerusalem (1949-1952). He won the first musical scholarship awarded in Israel to attend the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, where he was a student of Goffredo Petrassi (1955–1957). He completed his studies with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero on a fellowship at Brandeis University in 1959. The same year, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He relocated to Southern California, where he first became a French language and literature teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
In 1962, Lazarof joined the UCLA music faculty, teaching composition and organizing contemporary music festivals, and remained there until his retirement (1987). By 1982, Lazarof had devoted himself nearly full-time to musical composition. During his lifetime, 126 of his musical works were published with Associated Music Publishers (G. Schirmer, Inc.), Theodore Presser Company, and Bote and Bock et al. Many of his compositions were recorded by multiple classical record labels.
Monica Ohuchi
piano
Monica Ohuchi's "commanding pianism" (The New York Times) allows her an active career as a piano soloist, chamber musician, and pedagogue. She is the pianist and Executive Director of the NGO Fear No Music and a founding member of the piano quartet Thunder Egg Consort.
In Portland, where she lives, Monica performs with 45th Parallel at the Chintimini Chamber Music Festival and is a frequent guest on the city's All-Classical radio station. Her past engagements have included solo performances with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, the Marin Symphony Orchestra, the Newport Symphony Orchestra in the United States, and the New Millennium Symphony Orchestra of Spain.
Her solo album "Monica's Notebook,” released by Helicon Records, is a series of piano etudes written for her by her husband - the composer Kenji Bunch. Monica completed her higher music education at the Juilliard School in New York. After nearly two decades in New York, she and her husband relocated to Portland with their two young children and Pitbull-mix rescue. She has taught piano at Reed College since 2014.
Karin Dornbusch
clarinet
Clarinetist Karin Dornbusch has resided in Basel, Switzerland, since 1995 but grew up in a family of musicians in Stockholm. She has a strong connection to both Gothenburg and the Swedish West Coast. Her father was born and raised in Gothenburg. After diligent genealogical research, she discovered that her paternal grandmother’s family had lived on the islands of Orust and Tjörn for several centuries.
After studying at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin and the Musikakademie der Stadt Basel, she became an internationally sought-after clarinet soloist and chamber musician. In 1996, she won the Swedish Soloist Prize and the First Prize from the Basler Orchester Gesellschaft. In 1997, Vienna, Birmingham, Stockholm, and Athens concert halls selected her as a soloist in the Rising Stars concert series. She has performed as a soloist at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm.
Stefan Arzberger
violin
Stefan Arzberger received his first violin lessons at the age of four at the Robert Schumann Conservatory in Zwickau. In 1989, he began his studies in Leipzig with Prof. Klaus Hertel and was engaged by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1992, most recently as concertmaster. Before joining the Leipzig String Quartet in 2007, he worked in the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra as a guest concertmaster of major European cultural orchestras. Stefan has been a member of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra since 2003. He won numerous prizes and awards at national and international competitions and received the first Gewandhaus scholarship.
In addition to playing in the quartet, Stefan Arzberger has taught and continues to teach at conservatories in Leipzig, Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Mannheim, and most recently, he has been a violin and early music education professor in Regensburg.
National Culture Fund Grant
In October, our foundation was selected to receive a new grant from the Bulgarian National Culture Fund under its Dissemination program. This grant will enable us to expand our reach to three additional venues. We are beyond thrilled to have been selected for funding in a competitive process and to be able to reach more people in more venues.
Our work is made possible by funding from various sources, including invaluable individual donations. We hope you will consider including Off the Beaten Path in your end-of-year giving.
If you would like more information, you can visit our DonorBox Page or email us to learn more about opportunities to get involved.
FESTIVAL TEAM SPOTLIGHT
Boris Deliradev, editor and translator
Our work is only possible with the help of our many behind-the-scenes professionals. Their tireless attention to the various aspects of organization helps us achieve success.
One of these individuals is Boris Deliradev, who oversees all the texts we publish online and on paper.
Thank you, Boris!
SPOTLIGHT
NORTH CENTRAL BULGARIA
DEVETAKI PLATEAU
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Bulgaria has beautiful natural sights, traditions, and interesting people. As we began to think of the next chapter of our festival, we decided to peek at another region of our country: North Central Bulgaria.
We look forward to presenting two concerts and an event featuring the composer Peter Kerkelov on August 8-9 in the village of Karpachevo, Lovech region – the Bulgarian home to an amazing community of adventurers and entrepreneurs, including our designers Silvia and Youlian Avramov. This festival weekend will be organized with the Devetaki Plateau Association and the admirable Iva Taralezhkova.
We hope that many of you will join us! Use the link below to learn more about the region, and save the dates.
In the Works
VIDEOS - Live performances from or Sixth Edition
BEYOND THE MUSIC - We hope to continue working with organizations such as Clean and Green Bulgaria, Gorata.bg, and Bulekopack. We look forward to joining forces again to make our world greener.
SINGING HEARTS - Mariana Karpatova's summer camp for young singers will again bring together children of diverse backgrounds. They will make music together and perform for the community, the elderly, and people with special needs. Stay tuned for more details in the Spring!
