The final phase of the sixth season of Hungarian show in TV format – Virtuosos, is fast approaching. It is a unique classical music talent competition featuring performers up to twenty years old from Visegrad Four +. This year along with Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, will join Serbia.

My confidence that Bulgarian singers can perform anything, provided they are intelligent, well-trained vocally and have the ability to choose their roles in Wagner and Strauss operas with the right sense of tonality, expanded their horizons and gave a chance to dozens of new voices, says maestro Plamen Kartaloff in interview to Monitor.

Bulgarian opera lovers will have the opportunity to enjoy the opera Electra for the first time in Bulgaria on 26 and 29 November this year. The idea for the realisation of the production came from Acad. Plamen Kartaloff. Thus, the Sofia Opera and Ballet will join the most prestigious opera houses in the world which have in their repertoire the modernist work of Richard Strauss.

The stay on Livingston Island brings you the feeling that you are at the end of the world, as if on another planet, the Bulgarian musician Theodosii Spassov, a virtuoso player of kaval, says in an interview to Telegraph.

Cancelling concerts due to pandemic was not remotely easy. We thought long and hard about moving them to next summer, but I and my team decided that it would not be fair to lock up the money people spent on tickets for such a long period of time. So we refunded the ticket prices and I hope we can have these concerts when a sense of certainty and calm returns to our lives, the violinist Vasko Vassilev says in an interview to Monitor.

Having two gramophones in front of you, vinyl records and playing those like instruments instead of just letting them run, wow, it is an incredible feeling! My passion for gramophones as musical instruments (scratches, cutting, etc.) was born when a friend of mine showed me footage of a European competition from the DMC series. Personally, I think that if you have not gone through gramophones and vinyl records, you cannot call yourself a DJ, Fabrizio Parisi says in an interview to Telegraph Media.

For another year, Vienna Philharmonic will present its traditional Summer Night Concert to the lovers of classical music. The concert, which was scheduled for 21 May, will take place on 18 September. As usual, the concert will be held in the open, in the fabulous baroque gardens of Schoenbrunn Palace, but this time with much more limited audience.

US film Nomadland has won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival, the first such event held with live audiences since the Covid-19 outbreak, news wires reported. The film, by Chinese-born Chloé Zhao, stars Frances McDormand as a widow who lives as a nomad after the 2008 crisis.

Classical music lovers must keep their fans folded and endure the heat at the 100th edition of Salzburg Festival, which has drawn up an elaborate health safety plan instead of cancelling the season due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The magnificent jazz artist Gregory Porter, whose new single “Concorde” is an ode to space exploration, is set to perform on Thursday as part of a ceremony marking the launch of NASA’s next-generation rover that will search for signs of habitable conditions on Mars.