About ARS FEST, Concerts with the choir coming up, and the big band concert kicked ass

In Radlje a collective of beautiful humans, members of Kulturno društvo Radlje are creating ARS FEST, the artistic director of the festival is Izidor Leitinger, the festival is presenting local artists, orchestras and choirs. The latter is something that I find the most powerful and as an essential part of Slovenian culture. How deeply enrooted singing in a choir is, how the folk songs are transferred from mouth to mouth, how effortlessly love and care for humans, nature, understanding and talking about pain is being translated. I opened the festival on the 2nd of June with my original compositions and arrangements for a big band that I performed with the wonderful Big Band Radlje. A full orchestra playing my compositions and I even had a fantastic rhythm section with Dejan Hudoklin on the bass and Gasper Obsteter on the drums. The repertoire consisted mostly of my own pieces and I made an arrangement of Vivaldi’s Winter for big band, which was already powerful on its own, and got even more strength with the big band sound. 

A very special moment in the concert was an old Slovenian folk song I sang for the first time in front of an audience that was recently passed on to me by my grandmother. My next performance at the festival will be a solo show on the 17th in Vuzenica.

I am now already preparing for my next performance which will be with a youth choir in my hometown Velenje. It is supposed to be an open air concert, but considering the weather, you never know… lets see! 

If you want to see my solo performance with a choir come by to Velenje on the 15th of June or Novo mesto on the 20th of June. My next concert with a big band is on the 1st of July.