theartsdesk in Kovachevitsa - top Bulgarians and friends make peerless music in a remote village

Performers and public alike always treasure a beautiful and, in this case, remote setting for a music festival. But people matter as much as sense of place. When the players work together in various combinations for the duration, and tell you this is the highlight of their musical year, you know the achievement is utopian. And that was certainly the case with eight dynamic Bulgarian instrumentalists and three visitors new to the magic of Kovachevitsa.

The Off the Beaten Path Chamber Music Festival isn’t the first Bulgarian institution to bring culture to this perfectly preserved but not tourist-pickled village, 1000 metres above sea level in a green fold of the Rhodope Mountains in the south of the country. It has – amazingly – a cultural centre and library established in 1865, superbly and expensively restored with festival funds to make a concert hall that has an excellent acoustic. The church of the 1840s and its tower of 1900 – Kovachevitsa, now with 30 residents, is orthodox Christian, the next village down, Gorno Dryanovo, Muslim – is opposite, at a slightly lower level (Ottoman rule left the village mostly in peace, but decreed that the church couldn't be on the main street). In the 1970s the screenwriter and playwright Georgi Danailov came here and Kovachevitsa became established as a very specific kind of “Bulgarian Hollywood”. Danailov’s writing about the village, encapsulated in The House at the End of the World (not translated into English), can be sampled in a booklet I found in my accommodation. What American academics might call the “bad binaries” in which the choice is between cities overhung with smoke, full of “neurotic” individuals, and a natural paradise, go too far, but he clearly loved this place.

The chamber music festival arrived in Kovachevitsa (and in other places; the village is not its exclusive home but its nerve centre) in 2018 and this year was its seventh edition. Lora Tchekoratova, powerhouse pianist and vivacious, endlessly curious human, is the Chair of the Foundation, with husband, top violinist Georgy Valtchev, as Artistic Director; composer Dobinka Tabakova is on the honorary board, serves as honorary godmother and was the festival’s first composer in residence. Her Rhodopa for violin and piano launched the first festival. The title, Off the Beaten Path, was her idea. It follows on neatly from String Paths, the title of her first disc for ECM which made thousands of us fall in love with her music, and led to the incorporation of Bell Tower in the Clouds in one of the Europe Day Concert programmes I was glad to have a hand in at St John’s Smith Square. There's a link, too, to the related hint of another path, Stone Trail, the title of her stunning Piano Quintet which was the festival’s first commission in 2023.

A preliminary evening at the Dimiter Blagoev Community Centre in the town of Dobrinishte, overshadowed by the great Pirin mountain range, was my chance to hear it live, and the results were predictably powerful. Stone Trail was inspired by the mosaics in the Episcopal Basilica in Tabakova’s treasurehouse of a home town, Plovdiv, layered with pure geometry below and birds above.

The birdsong features, almost like angel messages, in the mystical, free-flowing second movement. My big question was how the exhilarating bell-like chords of the opening, “Carved in Time”, could possibly be matched by the finale, but they are, above all in the sheer exuberance of the coda which also (look and listen closer, which I still need to do) incorporates earlier themes and secret number-patterns inherent in the mosaic design. The proportions are perfect, the material superbly forged. Tchekoratova’s string colleagues in the performance and the above film are crucial collaborators in the festival: Valtchev, his fellow violinist Nikola Takov, viola-player Rumen Cvetkov and Alexander Somov, brilliant and sensitive chamber musicians all (pictured above with the composer hailing Tchekoratova). Fellow Bulgarians Teodora Atanasova (cello), Dora Dimitrova (violin) and Mariana Karpatova (mezzo) joined them over the four evening performances I attended.

Karpatova (pictured below with Tchekoratova) provided the song component, a perfect communicator with a rock-solid technique and, despite her undeniable mezzo status, considerable soprano power at the top of the register who charmed in four languages, starting with Bulgarian song in Dobrinishte. The lovesick essence of “The Blue-Eyed” by Georgy Zlatev-Therkin was impossible to miss, even without a translation to hand. Later songs by Tosti and Carrie Jacobs-Bond may not have matched Ravel’s Greek folk homage (sung in French) for creativity, but the delivery was equally committed. Not only was the Dobrinishte introduction a manifesto of things to come in its diverse and well-balanced programming; it also captivated a local audience, many of whom had never been to a concert before. Applause was regular and heartfelt, laughter unrestrained where relevant; they jumped and applauded delightedly at every gag in Schnittke’s Moz-art a la Haydn as nuanced (and whistled) by two of the violinists.

Starting with Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik for string quartet, led by a guest violinist and former leader of the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig, Stefan Arzberger, was a happy inspiration (and I can’t remember when I last heard it in a concert). Arzberger, who met two of the musicians when leading the Sofia Opera Orchestra in its annual Wagner Ring, brought cultured turns of phrase throughout, especially in the ornamental links of the Romanza. The other contemporary composer on the programme, featured throughout these concerts, also playing viola in his and other works, was Kenji Bunch, based in Portland, Oregon. Hard Winter/Holler and Stomp made for an earthy crowd-pleaser, drawing on the folk music of the Appalachians for both thoughtfulness – the piano at one point “treated” to sound like a banjo – and exuberant dance. Bunch’s music speaks directly, relying mostly on diatonic ideas and some strong polyphony, and both his Three Madrigals for Piano Trio and his four movements titled after a well-known instrumentalists’ joke The Viola Burns Slower worked well at Kovachevitsa in the varied programmes. But I missed the grit in the oyster.

Bunch’s wife, Monica Ohuchi (pictured above on the concert-hall terrace with Tchekoratova and Bunch, Tabakova looking on) is a scintillating pianist, well up to any of the challenges he throws at her. Twice we heard her partner Tchekoratova in the four-hand version of Ravel’s La Valse. Far more than in any orchestral performance, you wonder how the instrumentalists will weather the evermore grinding gears in this dismemberment of the waltz; these two did it with a panache that was a joy to watch as well as hear, both on Dobrinishte’s Bösendorfer with a Klimt on the inside of the lid and, more easily, on Kovachevitsa’s state-of-the-art Yamaha (pictured below, Ohuchi raises arms to let Tchekoratova execute a glissando across the keyboard). Two more piano quintets following Tabakova’s on consecutive evenings made big, late-romantic demands on the instrument. Vincent D’Indy’s was composed late in his life, in 1924 when he was in his seventies, but perhaps only the beguiling 5/4 outer portions of the Scherzo – French composers rarely wrote dud ones - put it beyond the 1890s (which was my guess). The first two movements overflow with individuality, while the Andante and Finale feel more generic, but Ohuchi in the company of Valtchev, Takov, Bunch and Somov kept the energy flowing throughout. 

Tchekoratova took over the piano role the following evening for Frank Bridge’s Piano Quintet. She loves it dearly and hears in it English woodland magic, but I found more in there of French influence; the best theme of this relatively early work (1904 in its first version, though revised seven years later) is the finale’s second, which sounds like the best of Fauré. Kudos to the teams for revealing to us two late romantic giants I’ve not heard live in concert before. Simple, on the other hand, to the point of danger, was Silvestrov’s Moments of Memory (V), a festival commission in league with five other organisations. The surprisingly prolific and uneven Ukrainian composer has been railing against the point of such music when the war rages, yet here it was, played by Valtchev, Somov and Tchekoratova with mesmerising inwardness that still didn’t quite save it feeling like two (out of seven) movements too many.

An unearthing of another trio, this time for strings (Takov, Cvetkov and Somov), by Henri Lazarov, a Bulgarian-born composer who’d settled in the USA, felt very much of its abrasive time (1970) and was lethally undermined in being preceded by the scrunching dissonances in Hindemith’s Germanically comic Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Sight-read by a Bad Spa Orchestra at 7 in the Morning by the Well as deliciously mis-played by Arzberger, Valtchev, Bunch and Atanasova. The fact that the band decides to sidle off into a Strauss waltz, which they play very well, provided another link, to the waltz song in Jacobs-Bond’s sentimental sequence and Ravel's Viennese nightmare. Starting with comedy, the final Kovachevitsa concert ended with pure love of life, arguably the happiest chamber work in the repertoire – the 16-year-old Mendelssohn’s Octet (pictured above). Part of the joy was to hear a new, strong violin voice from Dora Dimitrova (second from left). Like Tchekoratova and Valtchev, she’d been part of the Bulgarian talent which left, along with so many other citizens, for the USA in the 1990s, but she has returned to help give the country a cultural backbone in still-precarious times, and to support the democratic cause – another delightful human being.

The players were delighted to have Arzberger, relatively fresh from his concertmaster post in Mendelssohn’s home town of Leipzig, to cap the radiance, but the real coup came from cellist Somov, kicking off the fugal finale with such hell-for-leather energy that every other player in the composer’s even distribution of voices simply had to follow suit: the end truly crowning the festival. All this is only the core of unforgettable summer days in the mountains where Orpheus is said to have roamed. A week earlier, and we’d have roasted in 40 degrees, and witnessed the burning of mountain hillsides. But the rains had come, visited only seldom thereafter in perfect temperatures, and walks were plentiful. Tabakova is always there for the 7am ritual of ascent to a recently-built chapel in the pinewoods on a ridge above, descent via a spectacular view (Takov admiring it pictured above). Other pleasures were birds, butterflies, lunches of local produce on wooden terraces with more of the same to look at, children/teenagers of musician couples helping out with stage management, even Bulgarian dancing on the last night (I tried out a few steps but wouldn’t have mastered the 9/8 one). If you’re looking for the best in summer chamber music, in the most beautiful and unusual of locations, book soon for next year. I hope to be back.

• Off the Beaten Path Festival website
•  Read classical reviews on theartsdesk