Music season 2024/25 – 44th concert season/3st  concert

POA FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA

Tilen Draksler, conductor

Mitja Dragolič, conductor

In 2020 the conductor George Pehlivanian founded the Pehlivanian Opera Academy in Bled which also includes the POA Festival Orchestra, formed especially for his summer academy and featuring the best young Slovenian orchestral musicians. The Maestro Pehlivanian has toured throughout Slovenia and Europe with the orchestra. At this concert, the audience will have the opportunity to see two different conductors on stage, to observe and to hear the differences between them and their communication with the orchestral musicians.

The conductor and pianist Tilen Draksler is the first assistant of Maestro Pehlivanian, from whom he completed his Master’s degree in orchestral conducting at the Karatina Gurska Academy in Madrid. He completed his first Master’s degree in piano at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana and his postgraduate studies at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He has worked with many renowned orchestras, in 2023 he was appointed Assistant Conductor of the Armenian National Philharmonic Orchestra. In addition to his conducting roles, Draksler is the founder of the Amadeo Orchestra, producer and artistic director of the Amadeo Festival and secretary of the Slovenian Musicological Society.

Mitja Dragolič graduated with honours in clarinet from Prof. Alojz Zupan at the Academy of Music in Ljubljana in 2005. In 2014 he completed his conducting studies in Maastricht, the Netherlands, under the tutelage of Jan Cobra. In 2016 he received his Master of Music degree from the Ljubljana Academy of Music. He has collaborated with numerous musicians and ensembles in Slovenia and abroad and is a member of various juries and commissions. In 2022 he became the leader and conductor of the Slovenian Armed Forces Concert Orchestra.

Programme:

Golob: Four Slovenian Folk Songs

Puccini : Quando me’n vo (La Boheme)

Adamič: When You Come to Bled (arrangement)

Hrušovar: Day of Love (arrangement)

Wolf: Italian Serenade

F. Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Italian Symphony No. 4 in A major, Op. 90