Georgi Minchev

Ranking among the most prominent figures in Bulgaria's modern culture, and having achieved international prestige and recognition, GEORGI MINCHEV is a creative artist with a versatile scope of activity. Exposed to a wide range of traditions as a pupil of Marin Goleminov at the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music, a post-graduate student of Rodion Shchedrin and Aram Khachaturian at the Moscow Conservatory, and later studying in the US, England and France as a UNESCO scholar and working with Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory and Luciano Berio at IRCAM, at the Electro-acoustic centre for music at the Beaubourg (the Pompidou Centre), he developed his unique compositional style. As for his music oeuvre, exemplary of the modern Bulgarian school of composition, it commands respect with its originality and the dimension of its ideas, with the broadness of its imagery and genre, and with the free handling of modern compositional techniques. Minchev authored the ballet Fahrenheit 451 (based on Ray Bradbury's eponymous book), the oratorio Ancient Bulgarian Chronicles, Concert Music for Orchestra, Symphonic Prologue, Dynamic Spaces, Three Poems for mezzo-soprano and symphony orchestra, as well as concertos for piano, cello, wind instruments, chamber and vocal music, soundtrack scores to a number of popular Bulgarian films. His works have been in performance in France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Russia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Cuba, Colombia, Australia, Greece, Belgium, Austria, San Marino, USA, Netherlands, Spain, Japan, the United Kingdom and Finland. Georgi Minchev is recipient of some of the highest national and multiple international awards. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was included in the selection of the International Association of Music Experts in the United States in 1979 and ranked first among the recommended works at the 1981 International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) in Paris. In 1989, Minchev was awarded the European Lorenzo the Magnificent International Award at the International Medici Academy in Florence and was conferred the title of Honorary Senator of the Academy.