Vanuit Music Export Rotterdam worden doorlopend ondernemende Rotterdamse muzikanten ondersteund die bezig zijn ook voet aan de grond te krijgen buiten de landsgrenzen. Mihael Hrustelj vertrok in februari naar Slovenië voor een korte tour. Over hoe die ervaring was lees je in het volgende verslag (in het Engels)!
I disembarked in Slovenia a couple of days earlier in order to rehearse for my first concert with the female choir Aglaja. They invited me to collaborate with them and to write music for their choir. I find writing music for human voices particularly exciting and in my opinion they can deliver the richest harmonies in the form of sound. The fact that the concert was held in a church made it even more special. I also performed as a soloist with them, with their voices accompanying me and occasionally having some solo moments as well. The event was called Aglaja with Slovenian composers and some other great Slovenian composers wrote music for this special night as well.
The concert was very well accepted, the church was completely full and I even invited the duet with which we performed 2 concerts later to join for one song as a special surprise of the evening, which also worked great!
The following concert was a concert in Ljubljana Cankarjev Dom on the 21st of February.
It is a spectacular venue and I performed there with a magical duet Teofilovici Twins from Serbia, an a capella duo that found out about me basically through YouTube. They then invited me to collaborate with them. It was an absolute honor, I have been their fan for more than 10 years and this collaboration was very special to me. We still had to do some rehearsals, for which we met in Slovenia and worked very hard. The Ljubljana concert was SOLD OUT!
After the show in Ljubljana we had one more concert in Velenje on the 25th of February. The audience was also very lovely and warm and they were very enthusiastic about our collaboration. The concert was visited by about 200 people. The Twins are celebrating 30 years of their career in 2023. They are the gems of traditional Balkan music and I would love to bring them to The Netherlands as well some day for our people to hear this too.
With this tour all the collaborations gained me plenty of useful media attention and plenty of people visited our concerts. I am already getting some offers for the summer and later in autumn. I even did a recording of audio and video of some of the concerts. Also, for the first time in my touring life a big venue show was cancelled. There was a concert planned in Maribor, Slovenia on February 22, all the promo was already out and the tickets were selling, but unfortunately the organizer decided to cancel the show.
As I mentioned, we had quite some media attention. Two big national newspapers presented our work and story, then followed a presentation of the project on national TV in Slovenia, presentation of the project on national TV in Serbia and a presentation on the Slovenian national radio Radio Prvi.
