Greek Participation at International Music Festival in Sopron, Hungary

By on July 7, 2011 in news
The Greek band ”Strings Band”, which consists of students of the Department of Traditional Music of TEI Epirus, Arta presented modern adaptations of Greek traditional and art music, that have been applaused by organizers and guests.  The group closed the four-day event at the International Music Festival ”Volt Festival” in the Hungarian city Sopron, located at the Hungarian-Austrian borders.
The Greek band, which consisted of students Dimitris Kalantzis, Theofanis Kousiounelos, Michael Kyriakides, Christos Nenteli, Peter Kubios and Elias Ioannou, attended the “European Summer Camp”, which was organized especially this year as part of the Music Festival on the occasion of the Presidency of Hungary in the EU in the first half of 2011.  It aimed to accommodate and bring young musicians and students from EU’s member states together.
The festival, which has a tradition of 19 years, gathers more than 80,000 visitors annually. Participants showed musical trends from their countries in an effort to get to know each other and find common elements in contemporary European music production, while the Greek group participated upon invitation of the office of Hungarian Prime Minister and in coordination of the Press and Communication Office of the Greek Embassy in Hungary.
The importance of the Hungarian city Sopron in modern European history and in the process of European integration is symbolic, as in August 1989 the great European ”picnic” had been organized by citizens of the then German Democratic Republic, who then crossed by hundreds the borders to Austria and the West, forming the ‘prelude’ to the events that followed until the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year.