Baroque music fest brings historic European sound to Georgia (VIDEO)

Georgia is hosting the Caucasus region’s first baroque music festival, involving more than a dozen performers and international baroque stars.

The Tbilisi Baroque Festival will open on November 13 and host a range of performances for one week in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi and a one-off show in Kutaisi.

Playing a range of historical instruments, the Festival will showcase the talents of some of the best baroque musicians Jordi Saval, Christine Busch and Sergio Azzolini over seven evenings in the Rustaveli Theatre Recital Hall and at the Kutaisi Opera Theatre in central Georgia.

Organisers said the Baroque Festival would offer a "museum of sound of the European culture” and present the diverse range of the historic baroque genre as played by artists from Germany, Spain, Italy and other European states.

The Festival will also include an International Symposium for Baroque Music to celebrate 330^{years since the birth of celebrated baroque medieval composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Domenico Scarlatti and Georg Handel.}

Emerging around 1600 in Italy, the baroque style spread into the European arts scene with its grand and expressive approach to encourage drama, tension and grandeur in a range of art forms such as sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, theatre and music. Musical performances of the Baroque genre regained popularity in Europe in recent years.

The Tbilisi event was organised by the region’s only academic baroque music ensemble The Georgian Sinfonietta and supported by Georgia’s Culture and Monument Protection Ministry.

The Tbilisi Baroque Festival will continue until December 6. You can find the full Baroque Festival program here.