The radio opera "The Blue Piano" by Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska will have its long-awaited world premiere on May 3 in the First Studio of the Bulgarian National Radio within the framework of the Sofia Music Weeks International Festival. The title of the work is a tribute to the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, who painted in rhyme the memory of her childhood piano in her parents' wealthy home before she left Nazi Germany.

"The Blue Piano" recreates the fate of two female pianists who end up in concentration camps - Vera Lotar-Shevchenko and Alice Hertz-Sommer. Born in Turin and died in Novosibirsk, Vera was incarcerated in Stalin's Gulag, where at night she practiced on keys cut with a kitchen knife on prison wooden beds. Coming from a Jewish family in Prague, Alice was exiled to Nazi Theresienstadt, where she performed more than a hundred concerts, admitting that music was her sustenance.

"Each artist and person have their own soul, their own topics that are very close to them”, notes Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska.  “It's as if plots, ideas - all things that excite an author are closed inside a box. One of them is the theme of the Second World War and dictators, the resulting problems and strange upheavals in human life. People live happily, but at some point a war overtakes them and tragedy affects their lives - for example, the two pianists, as in the case of this opera."

The memories of female death camp survivors will be resurrected in a musical genre created in the 1920s, when radio became the primary means of communication and not long afterwards theatres would collapse in war. “The Blue Piano" will be performed by soprano Cynthia Knoch, mezzo-soprano Naama Liani, violist Stefania Yankova, percussionist Boris Budinov, pianist Miroslav Georgiev and the chamber ensemble for contemporary music MYX`D.

The author of the libretto and mise-en-scene, Matthias Vogt, will play the role of reader.

The dramaturgical line of the piece starts from hell and ends with an apotheosis of the power of music, in the most difficult environment possible, contrasting quotes from anti-Semitic legislation with poems by Marina Tsvetaeva and Else Lasker-Schüler. The score features non-traditional methods of sound extraction - for example, rubber ducks and Tibetan bowls, and at the end of it another strange instrument resembles a sound from heaven. And although the composer uses a modern musical language, the vocal parts are melodic.

Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska is the author of over 600 works in various genres, including eight operas. The last of them, acoustic-electronic and created in collaboration with Manuela Boncheva, will transport the audience to a world of dreams on June 25 of this year in the Sofia Opera House.

The composer settled in Luxembourg in 1996, where she studied modern compositional techniques and computer music, and in 2009 founded an international composition competition for children.

"Children get inspired by what their family, teachers, society conveys to them”, says Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska.“While our consciousness has already been formed in another era, their sense of the world is being created today and it is very important to present them with deeper and more serious things so that they can form a real idea about it - not only about this digital world in which they are born and grow. Therefore, works that refer to the past, that are inspired by tragedies or by common human themes, must be passed on to young people."

Read also:

• Works by Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska are performed at festivals throughout Europe
• Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska: The profession of composer is not a male privilege
• Albena Petrovic-Vratchanska and her Crystal Dream

Photos: albena-petrovic-vratchanska.com, Diana Tsankova

Translated and published by Rositsa Petkova