WARSAW, August 4 (Itar-Tass) — Western Polish town of Zielona Gora will host an international festival of Russian songs Saturday.
For the fifth time, the event that has been supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture will bring together active Polish and Russian performers in the arena of a concert hall named after Anna German, a pop star of the 1960’s and 1970’s who is broadly viewed in Russia as an element of the country’s national song culture.
Stars of the Russian show biz of nowadays have been entered in the program of the competition. Acclaimed Polish musicians will compete for the prizes – the gold, silver and bronze samovars.
All the songs will be performed in the Russian language and the winners will be determined with account of TV audiences’ text messages.
The jury panel did a very scrupulous selection of the performer who can appear on the stage of the Anna German concert hall, said the festival director, Tomasz Nesterowicz.
Of the fifty performers initially entered in the lists, only twelve have gotten to the finals this year, he said. “They will present a big diversity of music compositions,” Nesterowicz said.
“We didn’t set forth any strict demands as regards the choice and interpretation of songs and I think we’re going to see a very colorful spectacle,” he said in an interview with Itar-Tass.
The main highlight in the Russian part of the program is the Buranovo Grannies /Buranovskiye Babushki/ folk rock group that won the second position at the Eurovision song contest in Baku this year.
Among the young Russian performers, Stas Piekha, Sati Kazanova and Alexei Vorobyov will have an opportunity to demonstrate their giftedness to the Polish audiences.
The festival will begin late at night. Some 4,500 spectators will watch it in the concert hall and several more million will hopefully watch it by television.
“As a rule, we have very high viewer ratings because this festival enjoys a really big popularity,” Nesterowicz said. “We hope to expand its format in the future and to make it as popular as it used to be some fifty years ago.”
The organization of events of this kind is reciprocal and a similar festival of Polish songs will be held in Russia’s Baltic exclave region of Kaliningrad later this year.
“We hope it will turn into a televised event, too,” Neterowicz said. “It’s important to promote these initiatives, as they help our peoples to get to know each other better.”
He thanked the Russian Ministry of Culture for assistance, which the organizers of the contest receive for the fourth year in succession.
The current festival is a successor to a similar festival that was held regularly from the 1960’s through to the 1980’s and would typically gather thousands upon thousands of audiences by TV sets.
In the previous epoch, the Zeliona Gora festival would draw the mega-stars of Soviet pop music and would last four days.
At the initiative of Zeliona Gora residents the song contest revived in 2008 and it’s getting increasingly more popular.