About us

The Amadeus Chamber Music Society was founded in 2002 with the aim of promoting classical music and bringing together professional musicians in Slovenia. Between the years of 2002 and 2006, the Amadeus Chamber String Orchestra was active in the society, and from 2007 to 2010 the society organised a series of workshops for students of the Maribor Conservatory of Music and Ballet. In 2012, the Society performed its own classical music concert series for the first time, which we called Carpe Artem (seize the art). It was created under the patronage of the Maribor 2012 - European Capital of Culture project.

 The aim of the Amadeus Chamber Music Society is to provide a permanent offer of earnest chamber music with local performers and by involving Slovenian musical creativity and artistry. In doing so, we aim to maintain and develop our offer to an audience with a refined musical palate, while encouraging a wider audience to embrace more challenging works of music, thereby contributing to a higher musical culture and cultural values in the environment. At the same time, we offer an outstanding artistic and professional challenge to musicians, especially younger artists who, without the opportunity to perform at concerts, will soon go elsewhere or lose their artistic enthusiasm and will to get out of their professional routine.

The cycle offers a rounded programme of self-produced concerts featuring musicians that are artistically active in Slovenia, with guest appearances by Slovenian and foreign musicians who have established themselves on the European concert stage. Over the last ten years, the cycle has featured around 140 different musicians, including members from all four Slovenian symphony orchestras and 25 symphony orchestras from the EU, professors from both Slovenian conservatoires, the Academy of Music in Ljubljana and 18 foreign music colleges.

We find this way of bringing musicians together extremely meaningful, providing the concerts with a special charm. Musicians who play together all the time may achieve a high level of musicianship, but they always look at the interpretation of a piece of music from the same perspective - their own. Combining musicians who form the basic core of Carpe Artem chamber ensembles with musicians working in different artistic corpora and environments brings new perspectives to interpretation, and the musicians can then apply the gained experience to their primary artistic corpora. Our long-term goal is that the concept of the Carpe Artem series will create a broader, pan-Slovenian platform for high level performing Slovenian musicians of all generations, who are to collaborate with renowned musicians from abroad, especially Slovenians working abroad. We encourage musicians to participate in the selection of the programme and to explore less performed repertoire and to find suitable programmes by Slovenian composers. According to our data, most of the works included in the Carpe Artem Cycle programme have not been performed in Maribor in the last 15 years, and a large part of the programme can be said not to have been performed in Slovenia as a whole in the recent past.

Part of the integration is also the involvement of young musicians who are starting their professional career: the first prize winner of the TEMSIG competition of the highest age category performs in a chamber group with established musicians in the Carpe Artem cycle, and students of the Maribor Conservatory of Music and Ballet and other younger musicians participate in the Echo of Summer cycle.

The cycle is co-produced by the Slovene National Theatre Maribor.

The Echo of Summer Festival was first held in 2021 and aims to go back to its roots, to the original form of concerts - a form of chamber music that was not originally intended for large audiences and a genuine relationship between the performer and audience.

The programme of the concerts is lighter, fit for the summer and venues, or rather its main works are the iron repertoire of chamber music. This is to bring classical music closer to a wider audience.

Since 2015, the Society has been commissioning new works from Slovenian and foreign composers; the commissions are part of a programme funded by the Ministry of Culture. So far, new compositions have been contributed by Nana Forte, Jani Golob, Kristijan Krajnčan, Matic Romih, Dominik Jakšič, Tomaž Svete, Dušan Bavdek, Lucio Žganec, Tobias Peschanel and others.

The Society has participated in the release of five sound recordings - CDs and digital albums so far, three of which it has been the publisher of, together with the British label Hedone Records. Our recordings take place in Maribor's Union Hall, which, according to many musicians, has by far the best acoustics in the region.