Bodrum TurgutReis Welcomes Great Composers and Masters of Rendition

Dear Music Lovers,

This is the fifth year the D-Marin Turgutreis International Classical Music Festival has been sharing with you since it was created by the Doğuş Group as a musical event that has been a mecca to its audience for the last four years with its classy, compelling billings, its impressive stage performances, and its intellectual content; calling out to tens of thousands of people with the melodies it released to the firmament; and boasting the unique title of the planet’s “only classical music festival that takes place in a marina.”

As your growing interest encourages us to do better each successive year and to come up with more and more attractive offerings, our confidence in the quality of the programs we shared with you over our four-year history is refreshed by the admission of our festival to the European Festivals Association (EFA).

Geared to an intellectual theme every year, the festival in 2009 will focus on four composers to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the demise of the German/English composer George Frederic Handel, the 150th anniversary of the passing of the Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn and the birth of the German composer Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, and the 80th anniversary of the birth of the second-generation Turkish composer Ferit Tüzün.

Hence, part of the repertory of the festival that lasts four nights and seven concerts has been devoted this year to the works of these composers each of whom holds a respected position in the history of music. Additionally, we’ll be sharing with you outstanding examples from the baroque period and from our modern times by treating you to a feast of “1001 Nights in the Harem,” the violin concerto completed late 2007 by Fazıl Say, one of the prominent figures in today’s global musical arena, as Handel’s “Music for the Royal Fireworks” is being performed.

On the first night of the festival, the İzmir State Symphony Orchestra conducted by İbrahim Yazıcı will accompany Fazıl Say and Patricia Kopatchinskaja. The second night will open with Hande Dalkılıç’s (piano) recital at sunset, followed by the İzmir State Symphony Orchestra conducted by the Azeri Maestro Yalçın Adıgezalov accompanying Sun Huang, the true virtuoso of the traditional Chinese instrument erhu.

We will witness together the first rendition ever in Turkey of some of the most popular and equally challenging works in the literature of the violin with this instrument. The first concert of the third night, devoted entirely to the music of the baroque period, will come from İzmir Barok at sunset, to be followed later in the evening by the world-famous chamber music ensemble I Musici di Roma.

On the fourth night, following Zeynep Üçbaşaran’s (piano) recital at sunset, we’ll bring our already traditional festival to a close with a concert devoted exclusively to Austrian composers by the Symphonieorchester der Volksoper Wien (the Symphony Orchestra of the Viennese Public Opera), one of the leading orchestras of Central European school of music of the classical period.

I wish you all pictures of happiness framed in music as we redecorate the star-crowned Bodrum nights with melodies in the hope of sharing many more half decades with you in the future.

Artistic Director