Even the autumn season though has much to offer. The November Nostalgia Festival will provide an opportunity to meet a variety of contemporary artists from various parts of the music scene. This year's autumn festival will be all about Life Without Christmas. The title has been borrowed from a collection of prayers by Giya Kancheli, written between and This Georgian composer poured his experiences of living in the Soviet Union into these songs, confronting it with the world he encountered beyond the iron curtain he left Georgia for Berlin in and later settled in Antwerp, Belgium.
As the organisers have put it, " Life Without Christmas expresses the composer's yearning, pain, and insecurity, as well as his outcry against the upbringing he received under the oppressive Communist regime. His compositions portray Christmas as a celebration not as much of the birth of Jesus, as of a time for awaiting a joyous transformation.
Kancheli notes that, while faith may be a blessing, a great deal of evil results from religion becoming increasingly entangled in fundamentalism. The composer will be a guest of honour at the festival. He is known for a broad range of works. In his early years, he made his mark as an artist steeped in the avant-garde.
For many years he maintained close ties with the theatre community, composing music for plays and motion pictures. In , he became the musical director of the Rustaveli National Theatre in Tbilisi. He combined his work as a composer with an academic career teaching composition at a leading Georgian conservatory.
Kancheli's compositions are imbued with Georgian folklore and religiosity. Speaking of his inspirations, Kincheli explains: "I feel a connection to music that captures pain: not the pain of the author but rather that of others.
