PLETENITSA BALKAN CHOIR Christiane Karam, Director SOPRANOS Steffi Jeraldo - Stockholm, Sweden Anna Taipe — Beauvais, France Harsitha Krishnan — Channai, India Kristen Olssen — Boston, MA Lyusi Simon — Moscow, Russia MEZZO SOPRANOS Dana Protsenko — Sacramento, CA Inna Dudukina — Novosibirsk, Russia Sofia Lahr — Lighthouse Point, FL ALTOS Emily Shibata Sanchez — Nagoya, Japan Nadia Chechet — Saint Petersburg, Russia Monserrat Guadalupe Garibav Villalobos — Guadalajara, Mexico TENORS Natalia Karaseva — Moscow, Russia Nikolas Metaxas — Limassol, Cyprus Parham Haghighi — Mashhad, Iran Santiago Miquelajauregui — Mexico City, Mexico Why “World"” Strings? Berklee World Strings champions music from all over the world; there are so many musical tradi- tions - outside of what we consider to be Classical music - in which stringed instruments play an important role. In addition, there are countless traditions of music whose beauty and allure is so great that we string players are eager to paint their colors with the instruments we love. With the burgeoning of creativity in the string community combined with the diverse interests and accomplishments of the new players, it's only natural to pool our passions in a forum for develop- ing and showcasing new ideas, combinations and sounds. There'’s something about the sound of strings that seems to elevate the commonplace to profun- dity. In BWS we sometimes fight that with aggressive funky-ness, but it's also interesting to employ strings in playing music from economies where strings were/are not an affordable option or were so associated with the elite to render them ridiculous in folk settings. (Even if strings were available in some cases, it’s possible the predominantly European-trained players proved so stiff at playing folk styles that their music came off like a kind of parody.) Berklee World Strings aims to change that. Our challenge is to not only expand the repertoire for strings, but to acquire a flexible instrumental technique that responds to multiple languages of music, and an ear that is sensitive to regional accents and musical dialects. And BWS strives to be a kind of greenhouse for the Berklee community; we want to be an ensem- ble where music is cultivated that nourishes and reflects the unique appetites, inclinations and abili- ties of our international population, a population that in turn reflects the diversity of the city we live in and the world at large. While this may sound ambitious, at the heart is something simple: curiosity. As we explore and inte- grate new sounds, traditions, rhythms and styles we are really learning new stories, and each one opens us to perceptions and abilities that reveal new facets of ourselves. This discovery - pondering the meaning of new stories and expanding our palette of communication as musicians - makes the intense work we engage in a source of constant renewal. And finally, BWS is an international consort, we are made up of musicians from all over the world. This is not a coincidence, but an essential aspect of creating new repertoire and internalizing new stories. Only by embracing each individual, and each heritage, does the ensemble function at its peak. This appears easy when practiced by youth, and in fact I'm convinced that if the whole world knew how much fun it is to be creatively engaged across cultural divides, it would never settle for anything less.