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ccurring every five years, the three-day festival cele- brates the traditions of each region of Bulgaria: singing, storytelling, dancing, and folk tunes played on such instruments as the kaval flute, gadulka (upright fiddle) and gaida (bagpipes). It is one of the only events in the world where the artists outnumber the audi- ence with 15,000 performers and just a few thousand ‘others’. Teenage troupes and their very elderly grandmothers clamber up the mountainside in scorching heat, wearing thick woollen clob- ber, to get to their stage. Communities rehearse for years for their 15-minute slot, which is performed to a panel of gratified researchers and ethnomusicologists.


It’s the perfect place for those once-in-a-lifetime cultural exchanges. On the first day in the mountains, some choir members began to chat with a bunch of four elderly women, all dyed hair and big earrings. Eventually the two groups began exchanging songs, listening respectfully to each other. The women poured out their voices as naturally as breathing, and it gave us a taste of how privileged our own collectors of the last century must have felt to be part of those incredible moments.


Groups of female singers are prominent at the festival, but there is still an abundance of other characters. We met one impressively decked old boy who made his own gaida. And when I say ‘made’, I mean he actually reared the goat, before killing and skinning the creature. “The bag is made from its hide,” he showed us, “and the head is sewn on afterwards.” Two marble eyes stared back at us. Its owner smiled and said, “He has a brother”, before whipping out a matching animal and blowing into its body.


On day three, the LBC were billed as last on the international stage, due to go on at 9pm. But the festival organisers saw no rea- son to rush anyone, so it was a little past midnight before the Lon- doners got to sing. The 40 choir members managed to capture the hearts of the audience in the village. Stood in front of me, two beefy drunken men with shaved heads threw their arms around each other and wailed along, pints in hand, to a freedom fighting song. Then behind me an energetic horo (circle dance) began as the choir broke into the faster numbers of weddings and sock-knit- ting. Before long, the whole square had become a giant coiling snake of people, with linked arms and thrashing feet.


After the gig, the choir dispersed. Some returned to their part- ners and children in the hotels, and others carried on in local bars. Tucked away in one restaurant was the same group of women who had first shared their songs in the mountains. They’d had a long meal and were still singing, albeit now drunkenly. On seeing some choir members they cheered and broke into a rousing number about personal hygiene that had two of our Bulgarians, Diana and Jordan, shrieking and hiding their faces with embarrassment. Shortly, the women were thrown out of the restaurant for being too rowdy, but Diana and Jordan joined them for a while. Both had very quiet voices for a few days afterwards.


8-9 August: Plovdiv. Our next port of call was two hours away in Thrace, sheltered by seven isolated hills. This gives Plov- div’s August air a certain thickness that even the best hotel’s air conditioning can’t quite deal with. By the time the choir had gath- ered to sing, dark clouds had also gathered to offer some relief. And they opened just as the concert began.


Having seen the choir on TV, around 80 people sheltered under nearby trees in the town square to watch. Through rain and thunder, with popping microphones, the singers stood under the huge canvas ‘Londonskiya Bulgarski Hor’ sign, and ploughed through no less than 18 songs. Highlights included Shto Mi E Milo – about a man who longs to own a shop in Struga so he can watch the women walk by with their colourful jugs of water; and Pilentse Pee – about a nightingale who warns everyone to “make love while you still can, for many years of fighting are ahead”. (You can hear this song on the Looking For A New England CD that came with the Nov/Dec issue of fRoots). It has to be said, great big claps of thunder and huge forks of lightning give those dissonant cadences a certain something, and the entire audience loved it enough to stay until the end. And the choir even got to keep the canvas sign.


9-11 August: Stara Zagora. 13 years after beginning her career as a professional singer, Dessislava Stefanova brought her choir back to where it all began – a children’s folk performance group called Zagorche, in her home city of Stara Zagora.


On entering the stuffy rehearsal room, 30 tiny faces stared up with grins of excitement. The two groups first met on the 2005 tour, and again in 2009 when today’s Zagorche amazed British audiences at the Thames Festival with their unnervingly profes- sional Bulgarian showcase: eight-year-old boys stomping about


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