Location: Malta

The four 2020 Medinea sessions of the year are each open to a dozen of young and talented musicians from the Mediterranean basin (building their careers to become professional artists) and who have an intense practise of musical improvisation, even of the composition. Each session is designed for a large diversity of musical aesthetics and Mediterranean expressions and hosts all styles of music using elements of improvisations (jazz, traditional music, early music, etc.). This training offers a unique intercultural experience of the life of an ensemble in creation, in rehearsals and on tour.

This first 2020 Medinea session welcomed ten emerging artists from Algeria, France, Greece, Malta, Portugal and Tunisia and ended up with a concert in Valletta on February 27th at the Robert Samut Hall in Floriana. Fabrizio Cassol, composer and jazzman, guided this session and proposed to the emerging artists selected to experiment with techniques of collective composition, within an ensemble, with the aim of leading to the creation of a common musical production which also reveals individual singularities. Besides that composition training, the artists had the opportunity to meet and learn with Christiane Louis, Leader of the professional development programme for musicians at the Philharmonie de Paris and to rehearse and play with, Yvette Buhagiar, Maltese Ghana singer.

This session was coproduced by the ARC Research Consultancy, the Mediterranean Youth Orchestra (MYO) and the Festival d’Aix in collaboration with the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra and the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta and was supported by the Arts Council Malta, the Erasmus+ Programme, the Fondation Orange and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation