BEGINNING OF THE 31st INTERNATIONAL MUSIC FESTIVAL NIGHTS IN OLD LJUBJANA TOWN
Today the 31st International Music Festival Nights in Old Ljubljana Town, the largest street festival in the capital, takes off. It will take place between 29th and 31st August 2019 and will once again fill the old city center with a cultural beat. For this year’s edition of the festival, we have prepared a particularly attractive and quality programme. Traditionally, the attendance to all events will be free.
This year’s festival is also part of the European project Voices of Minorities, which has already been successfully implemented in Hungary in Budapest (Budapest Folk Fest), in the Belgian Ghent (Trefpunt) and in Italy in various places in Tuscany (Musicastrada). The programme will thus include the best minority ensembles from different countries, aiming to highlight the often undervalued and even overlooked influence of minorities on society and culture (especially music) in the European area. According to the director of the Imago Sloveniae Foundation, Janos Kern: “In cooperation with foreign partners in the EU project, we have managed to prepare a particularly high quality and diverse programme that will highlight the great diversity and cultural intertwining of artistic creation. With the current festival theme, we want to encourage reflection on greater tolerance and understanding of diversity.”
The festival Nights in Old Ljubljana Town will host as many as 34 events at eight venues, featuring over 150 musicians from 28 countries. The concerts will take place under the magical summer night sky at Novi, Dvorni, Stari and Gornji trg, as well as at the Špica Park and the City Museum. Traditionally, the venue under the Plečnik’s Arcades will be dedicated to dance (Thursday – tango, Friday – salsa, Saturday – swing). An International Multidisciplinary Symposium entitled Sound, Song and Politics will be held in the hall of the GIAM ZRC SAZU Geographical Museum, organized by the Imago Sloveniae Foundation in collaboration with the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana and the Scientific Center of the Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU).
The opening of the festival with the Big Band RTV Slovenia and guests (Marina Martensson, Boštjan Gombač, Goran Bojčevski, Nino Mureškič), which will be tonight, Thursday, August 29, at 8 pm at Novi trg, is a continuation of our long-standing cooperation with RTV Slovenia. The event will also be broadcasted live by the 3rd programme of the Radio Slovenia – programme ARS, which will co-create the program live on festival venues.
Nights in Old Ljubljana Town will serve a striking internationally colored programme. In the spirit of minority influences, Gulaza, a Jewish ensemble from Israel in which a man sings Arabic music by oppressed Yemeni women, Cubismo, a well-known Cuban ensemble, featuring Croats, Slovenes and Latin Americans living here and a Roma ensemble from Italy, will be introduced. You will also be able to listen to Africans living in Slovenia, the most prominent creators of Romano-Spanish flamenco, various music under the Balkan influence created by living immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and many other interesting international music artists.
This year, the festival will also be held in the event of rain, on two covered stages at Novi and Stari trg. For a carefree enjoyment of the evening, visitors will be provided with free raincoats.
The full program of this year’s Nights in Old Ljubljana is published on our new festival website https://noci.imagosloveniae.net, which was set up together with the Faculty of Computer and Information Science of the University of Ljubljana, within the project »Student Innovative Projects for social benefit ”co-financed by the Republic of Slovenia and the European Union from the European Social Fund.
