Description
The new Mara! and Martenitsa album Za Vas, Ot Nas (For You from Us) was released in November 2025 and launched at three special NSW – the Bundanoon Folk Festival, the iconic Camelot Lounge in Sydney and the Hamilton Uniting Church in Newcastle.
Recorded at Megaphon Studios, Universal Forbes St, and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, this album showcases a wealth of previously unrecorded works composed and commissioned especially for Martenitsa Choir and the Mara! band.
Composers include Llew and Mara Kiek, Paul Cutlan, Laura Bishop and Sandy Evans in addition to Bulgaria’s premier choral composer, the late Ivan Spasov.
Librettists include Stephan Kozuharov, Marcia Malinova-Anthony and Silvia Entcheva.
The Mara! Big Band exploded onto the Australian music scene in March 2022 with the premiere of their stunning new work Zashto?, which was hailed as “…a triumph and a treat…” by Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Jessie Cunniffe.
This new collaborative suite, featuring poetry by migrant and refugee writers and compositions by Sandy Evans, Paul Cutlan, Mara Kiek, Andrew Robson, Tony Gorman and Llew Kiek, was commissioned by Mara Kiek in 2019, with the support of Create NSW. Originally scheduled to tour in 2020 with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts, the project faced cancellations two years in a row because of the pandemic.
The Mara! Big Band, a 13-piece ensemble, features some of Australia’s greatest world/jazz musicians, straddling the Eastern European Gypsy Brass Band and Jazz Big Band traditions, to produce a kaleidoscope of musical colours.
Zashto? was recorded in 2022 and released as a CD in 2023. The band took to the road again in November 2024, touring Zashto? to regional NSW
