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Friday, June 28, 2024

Pancho Vladigerov - Orchestral Works (Nayden Todorov)


Information

Composer: Pancho Vladigerov
  • Seven Symphonic Bulgarian Dances, Op. 23
  • Vardar Rhapsody, Op. 16
  • Bulgarian Suite, Op. 21

Rousse Philharmonic Orchestra
Nayden Todorov, conductor

Date: 2019
Label: Naxos

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Review

I do hope that this fine new recording will mean that Pancho Vladigerov’s music becomes better known. There are recordings, but they are not easily available, and even the two discs of his music made by CPO are no longer available. His work was once very well known indeed both in and outside his native country, and in spite of being Bulgaria’s most famous national composer, he had a cosmopolitan background, having been born in Switzerland (where his grandfather, a relation of Boris Pasternak, had settled), and studied in Berlin before settling definitively in Sofia in 1932.

Vladigerov’s music may be broadly described as ‘romantic nationalist’; he makes much use of folk material from his native country, as the titles of both Seven Symphonic Bulgarian Dances and Bulgarian Suite would suggest, but in combination with a tremendous gift for orchestration: his setting of Bulgarian folk music in a broadly Western European context was effectively the crystallisation of the tradition of art music in a Bulgaria only recently liberated from Ottoman domination (the Third Bulgarian State was proclaimed in 1878).

In many ways, the most impressive work here (as well as the earliest and the best known) is the Vardar Rhapsody, originally written in 1922 for violin and piano and entitled Balgarska rapsodiya ‘Vardar’, a powerful evocation of the River Vardar, which runs from Vrutok in what is now North Macedonia to the Aegean Sea. Performances are excellent, and particularly inspired in the variegated colours of the Bulgarian Suite. One is inspired to hope Naxos might follow this up with recordings of some of Vladigerov’s five piano concertos and two violin concertos.

-- Ivan Moody, Gramophone


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Pancho Vladigerov (13 March 1899 – 8 September 1978) was a Bulgarian composer, pedagogue and pianist. He is arguably the most influential Bulgarian composer of all time, and was one of the first to successfully combine Bulgarian folk music and classical music. Vladigerov marked the beginning of a number of genres in Bulgarian music, including violin sonata and piano trio. He was also a very respected pedagogue; his students include practically all notable Bulgarian composers of the next generation, such as Alexander Raichev, Alexander Yossifov, Stefan Remenkov, and many others, as well as the pianist Alexis Weissenberg.

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Nayden Todorov (born 8 April 1974 in Plovdiv) is a Bulgarian conductor. He graduated from the Dobrin Petkov National School of Music in Plovdiv  in the piano class of Darina Kantardzhieva and trumpet class of Lilia Kovacheva-Toporcheva. Since 1997 Todorov has been the musical director of the Thracian Summer international festival. From 2005 to 2017 he was the director of the State Opera in Ruse. In 2017 Todorov was elected director of the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra. He has made several hundred recordings for the Music Minus One label. He has also recorded for the DanaCord, Hungaroton, and Naxos labels.

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