International festival bringing music and stars to Mersin

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Los Vivancos

The Mersin Music Festival is back for another year, bringing international music starts to the Mediterranean province and injecting a dose of culture into the city.

The festival will host a total of 355 artists this year and will open with a concert from the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra and Shlomo Mintz on May 10.

Turkish singer Fatih Erkoç will be taking the stage on May 12, followed a day later by the Presidency Symphony Orchestra and Ferhat Erdem at Tarsus’ St. Paul Museum.

Tarsus will also host Arpanatolia for a unique show on May 14 that will feature a performance conducted solely with the leading musical instruments of the Hittite civilization of 3,700 years ago.

In addition to the harp, the kaval and the double kaval from antiquity, Arpanatolia also uses more modern instruments such as the reed, the ney and the modern harp. Arpanatolia interprets folk songs compiled from Anatolia’s rich traditional music and Turkish folk poems with a new understanding, combining traditional musical instruments dating back thousands of years with the modern harp and revealing the unique beauty of melodies that blend joys and sorrows.

Algerian star Souad Massi will appear May 15 at the Mersin Culture Center with her eclectic mix of rock, country, fado and Algerian music.

The art director of the festival is Remiz Buharalı, and he will be staging a theatrical show on May 16 for the 200th birthday of Verdi and Wagner.

Mersin-born artists such as Alican Süner (violin), Bengisu Gökçe (violin) and Cem Oslu (piano), will give a concert at the Latin Catholic Church on May 17. The three young artists named “Mersin’s Rising Stars’ will perform a program in two parts.

In the first part, Süner and Oslu will interpret Franck’s “Sonata for Violin and Piano in A major.”

Music is international language

On May 18, young Russian pianist Olga Scheps will take the stage at the festival. Scheps has divided her Mersin recital program into two parts, playing interpretations of Schubert’s works in the first part before moving onto solo piano pieces by Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Schumann in the second part. The recital will open with the innovative “Impromtus,” which Schubert wrote a year before his death.

Schubert is the master of these single piano pieces meaning, “Improvised” in Latin. Scheps will perform three of the four Impromtus. Music historians claim that whether played individually or altogether, each has a distinct taste of its own. The aim of the festival is to bring the city and region together with universal music from the principle “Music is Humanity’s International Language.” While satisfying the requirement of this fundamental principle, the festival aims to bring the best musicians of the world in Mersin.