Bogotá sacred music festival celebrates 10th anniversary with love as its theme

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Bogotá International Festival of Sacred Music, with “Love” as its main theme, will celebrate its 10th edition between September 9 and October 3, with special guests from Switzerland, France, Czech Republic, Italy, Spain, Israel, USA, Germany, Hungary, and Colombia.

“We are fully confident that this year we will be able to hold the festival on-site with a very limited capacity. For the concerts we will demand a PCR test or vaccination card,” explained the festival’s director Marianna Piotrowska.

Along these lines, she explained that the concerts will be attended by between 50 and 100 people, and the festival will be aired by Canal Capital and the event’s digital platform.

The festival’s goal is to promote unity, dialogue, respect for diversity of beliefs, culture of peace and reconciliation through Ambrosian, Gregorian, Byzantine, classical, romantic and contemporary music, as well as traditional spiritual rhythms from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

PROGRAM

The festival will feature 36 events, including 16 concerts, 4 master classes and 16 lectures, according to the organizers.

These activities will be held at traditional venues in the Colombian capital, such as the National Museum, the San Ignacio Church, the Reyes Católicos Cultural and Educational Center Auditorium and the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Theater, as well as at the Zipaquirá Salt Cathedral, one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions, located near Bogotá.

Guests include the American lutenist Hopkinson Smith; French musicologist Marcel Peres; the Czech Republic’s Epoque quartet, broadcasting a live performance from the Brevnov Monastery in Prague, and the Italian ensemble La Terza Prattica.

Israeli musicologist Yogev Shetrit, American Karen Slack and the EPidBrass brass ensemble from Germany will also participate.

FESTIVAL’S OFFICIAL IMAGE

The festival’s official image will be the work “Clarinete” by 91-year-old Colombian artist David Manzur, one of the country’s most prominent living visual artists.

“This year David Manzur created the work specifically for the 10th anniversary and donated it to us. David Manzur is a lover of baroque music, a collector of lutes. He is a music lover painter,” noted Piotrowska.

Scholars of Manzur’s work assure that his art was influenced by the Renaissance and Baroque periods. They point out that he incorporated colored nylon thread fabrics in his works, and mastered the mural, portrait, still life, nude and dress.

As part of the festival’s celebration, “My Jerusalem, a Diverse City” photographic exhibition was also inaugurated on Friday, presented at the Andino Mall in Bogotá.

“Colombia and Israel have built a great cultural and social bond, and what better way to show this than through these talented photographers and curator Adi Yekutieli, who today offer us the opportunity to get to know the diversity of Israel and its eternal capital,” said Christian Cantor, Israel’s ambassador to Colombia.