Carmina Slovenica

Best known as a highly innovative and widely acclaimed 'vocal theatre' ensemble, Carmina Slovenica also stands for the production house that deals with festival and concert production, music education, publishing and some other ensembles, including the Carmina Slovenica Concert Choir. At the heart of all this stands Karmina Šilec, foremost known as the artistic director and conductor of the main CS ensembles.

The Vocal Theatre Carmina Slovenica incorporates music, drama, movement, and other performing elements, and has as such importantly enriched the field and, furthermore, the concept of chorality itself. Its projects straddle the fields of classical, ethnic and avant-garde music and are complex multi-media events that have premièred at numerous prestige theatres and concert halls all over the world. The ensemble, as well as Karmina herself, has been given a number of awards for its artistic prowess.

Conductor Karmina Šilec with Carmina Slovenica choir in the Božidar Jakac Art Museum courtyard at Kostanjevica na Krki

Background

The predecessor of Carmina Slovenica has been the Maribor Youth Choir. In operation since 1964, it was taken over by the current artistic director and conductor in 1989 and renamed into Carmina Slovenica in 1997, when it was also formally registered as a cultural institute.

Up until that year, the Maribor Youth Choir has also been a rather successful, internationally recognized choir. In the 1970s and 1980s it regularly toured around Europe and won numerous youth choir competitions abroad. It was awarded the BBC Radio Award, had been given the special prize of the Zürich Radio  "Grosse Kanne" and received the Prešeren Fund award, being the first choir ever to be awarded in this way. After Karmina took over, the choir continued its illustrious path, gathering further wins at international competitions, touring worldwide (even in South Africa) and accelerating its publishing activities. In 1993, the Choral School CS was established.

Productions

The main ensembles of CS are the Vocal Theatre Carmina Slovenica, the Carmina Slovenica Concert Choir and the Ensemble ¡Kebataola!. The latter is noted for noted for its programming which explores works from the 9th century onwards, and for working with chants, songs and arrangements of folk tunes from Sweden, Ukraine, Africa, and the whole Balkans region. In a way that is characteristic for the work of Karmina Šilec (who lads all three ensembles) work, ¡Kebataola! integrates electronics, video, the visual arts and literature, often juxtaposing contrasting elements found in ancient and contemporary music.

CS's 'youth division' and choral school activities feature two children choirs, the Children Choir PU and Children Choir Junior CS (both of them also active in the extended understanding of a choir performance), as well as vocal soloists. Regular stand-alone workshops, seminars, lectures   are enacted as well.

Additionally, there are the International festival Choregie, the Attacca Festival and the Attaca concert cycle and residence programme  , and the Cstudio, where visual arts exhibitions are regularly held. Carmina Slovenica has published 16 CDs or LPs, a number of DVDs (among them the documentary film Placebo (2012)) and a few books and music editions.

Karmina Šilec

For many years now, Karmina Šilec has been researching new artistic concepts and techniques for choirs and musical theatres – she developed the concept chorgie for her work . She has acted as a conductor for various companies and ensembles, among them the Radio Slovenia Symphony Orchestra, the Slovenian National Opera and Ballet Maribor and the Slovenian National Project Choir. She is the director of the Vocal school Carmina Slovenica and was Professor for choral conducting at the University of Maribor (Slovenia) for several years.

She has received more than 20 of the highest international awards and special recognitions, among them the award by the ITI – International Theatre Institute "Music Theatre Now" in the category Music beyond opera, and the prestigious International Robert Edler Prize for Choral Music for her exceptional contribution to the world choir movement. As a jury member she has joined more than 50 competitions worldwide, she is also member of several artistic committees and commissions. As a repertoire editor she cooperates with Earthsongs Publishing and CS Editions.

Karmina is also active in the field of education. She works as an artistic adviser for choral music, gives lectures to conductors and is often lecturer at universities and symposiums around the world, both for music and theatre studies. Her fields of speciality also have to do with Mental And Physical Training For Singers and Actors, Mental Skills Of A Conductor and Ethnic Vocal Music.

In many of her stage projects Karmina Šilec is also the stage director, set designer and choreographer.

Choergie

The word choregie has got roots in the Greek language where choregs were supposed to be patrons of art, and the idea about developing the Choregie concept draws largely from Greek tragedy, particularly the role of the choir in it.

With 'Choregie - Vocal Theatre or Theatre of Voices' Karmina started to open up new spaces to multi-form music events, and to wider spaces to expression, intensity of experience, communication. It was not about breaking down boundaries between disciplines, it was about putting them next to each other, about coexistence. Choregie represents two fields: the artistic principle of creation of stage projects, and a specific method of working with ensembles developed by Karmina Šilec.