The International Summer Academy within the Varna Summer International Music Festival commenced at first its activities as music performance workshops. The first violin workshop was organized in 1978. It was led by Prof. Yfrah Neaman from Guildhall Scholl, London. Two years later Neaman was again a tutor of an interpretation course and thus was set the beginning of his repeated visits in Varna (as the critics said the violinist had turned into an idol of the festival audience). A phenomenon thus started and since then it has been functioning as a relatively independent educational structure within the framework of the festival – the International Varna Summer Academy.(Its status was approved in 1985). In the course of years the master classes included in this very interesting form of the Varna Summer was varied with more and more new courses: chamber music, percussions, French horn, piano, violoncello, conducting, trumpet and others. Many of the tutors giving also concerts in the festival programme have left behind them a deep trace in the image and memory of the Varna Summer.

Prof. Rozmari Statelova, Ph. D. (from The Summer of Bulgarian Culture)

The prestige of the Academy has been establish by the names of renowned professors such as Yfrah Neaman, Roza Fain, Vera Gornostaeva, Germaine Mounier, Boris Bloch, Janos Starker, Robert Cohen, Karl Osterreicher, Andras Adorjan, Vaclav Junek, Edward Tarr, Siegfried Fink, Thomas Martin, Hermann Baumann, Margarita Lilova, Lazar Berman, Catherine Vickers, Frank Lloyd, Michael Roll, Joaquin Clerch…

In recent years the Art Director Prof. Mintcho Mintchev has realized his overall idea for joined-up concerts of the tutors which take place only here. Everyday work, freedom and creative contacts between the different generations, sometimes the sudden transformation of one young musician, the magic of the festival stage, ensemble performances – all that which is born right here right now and everything else enhanced by the striving after artistic excellence and invention create the unique experience of the Academy.