The 5th annual Pacific Fusion jazz festival and competition will be held on 25-26 April 2019.
“This year’s fifth edition of the International Children’s Jazz Festival-Competition will be a real milestone for the event’s organizers, as well as for the young musicians who participate,” notes ILS Principal Olga Shevchenko, who also serves as Pacific Fusion’s director. “This spring we saw the tremendous interest that jazz performance generates among young people. Their teachers took a very serious approach to preparations for the event, and for three days, we were immersed in an ocean of wonderful music and high-quality performances.”
Over the past five years, Pacific Fusion has matured and the level of musical mastery has increased, as has the number of performers. Moreover, every year the conditions for participation have become more challenging.
“Jazz performers show their mastery of improvisation, technique and artistry,” says Anatoly Smirnov, who is artistic director and lead conductor of the Pacific Symphony Orchestra and will serve as chair of this year’s panel of judges. “We have made the terms of participation more rigorous for the 2019 performers, with the competition taking place in two stages: extra-festival and intra-festival. For the extra-festival stage, musicians will send a video of their planned performance to the judges’ commission, which I believe should raise the quality level significantly.”
The field of competitors at Pacific Fusion is expected to include young performers from music schools and studios in Primorye, Amur and Khabarovsk regions, and notices have also been sent to young musicians oversea
