Planet Carmina

Book / 2020

Accompanying one of the best choirs to six continents meant writing our own Lonely Planet or Travelling Planet on those journeys together. Landscapes, real and imaginative, are mixed together, they fuse into an exciting universe, where realistic distances between Spell by Lojze Lebič in the Andes and Drumlca in the largest concert hall in Tokio or Adiemus from the window of the University of Ljubljana and Benedicamus in Spanish Las Huelgas disappear. They are all merging into a densely populated, authentic, unique Planet Carmina. Travelling with Carmina Slovenica brings a different point of view, stepping onto the greatest stages from the backstage, mixing with audiences of all countries, breathing with them, observing the phenomenon in microscopic and telescopic view all at once. It is outward and inward, an oscillation, co-undulation, co-habitation with a delicate seismograph. It is demanding, passionate, euphoric. It is dealing with special laws of the collective which the uninvited cannot and should not ever fully penetrate. (Melita Forstnerič Hajnšek)

author: Melita Forstnerič Hajnšek

This book about conductor and artistic director Karmina Šilec, her original and exploratory approaches to music and theperforming arts, her world-renowned choir, and the vocal theatre Carmina Slovenica, presents an exhilarating chapter in Slovenian artistic music, spanning Slovenia and the world, the global and the local. In 1989Karmina took over the Youth Choir Maribor and turned it into a highly potent work of art which breaks the stereotypes of choralmusic.Capturing the conductor’s and her choir’s home and the world – from Japan to Canada, from Sweden to China, from Australia to the USA, from Argentina to Borneo, from Russia to South Africa … –means dissecting the division between Slovenian and international identities, between the national and the global. It is a story of distances crossed by a renowned Slovenian collective which reaches far beyond the Gallus Hall in the Cankarjev dom Cultural and Congress Centre in Ljubljana and finds its place on the most prestigious stages at the pinnacle of global artistic music. 

 also in English translation