Beatles Suite for Children’s Choir and Orchestra

The Beatles Suite for children's choir and symphony orchestra was written in the 1990s and has been performed with great success across the country. It was composed after an idea of Emil Tabakov for the Sofia Philharmonic and premiered by the Pim Pam vocal group. Lyubomir Denev's artistic interest in jazz and pop music can also be traced in a series of his opuses for symphony orchestra over the years. For example, Sofia Nights , a work for symphony orchestra , in which the composer seeks a dialogue with genres and eras and, as he has shared in interviews, his goal is to create a Bulgarian equivalent of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Or Divertimento Grosso, a sprawling piece for symphony orchestra and big band, in which the provocation is the possibility of gradually synchronising the different instrumental sonorities. He created a rock symphony on the most popular Queen songs - Queen's Hits - commissioned by Maestro Nayden Todorov for the repertoire of the Ruse State Opera Orchestra. The 20 minute long Beatles Suite features 11 of the most famous songs in the band's repertoire ("Something", "Lady Madonna", "Yesterday", "Michelle", etc.). The composer brings out their different imagery, building an overall structure of the work made up of separate contrasting pictures. As Lyubomir Denev describes, he became fascinated by the music of the Beatles as a schoolboy. In their songs he discovered the genres embedded in the music of an entire era. The piano plays a significant role in the piece, and in some of its performances he plays the keyboard part. The suite ends with Hey Jude with piccolo trumpet giving a kind of baroque sound to the orchestra. The performance by a large symphony orchestra and a large children's choir, in this case by two vocal ensembles, adds to the monumentality of the work.