The Fantasy Homage to Schubert by Dobrinka Tabakova (for viola and string orchestra) was completed in 2013. In the same year, the work was premiered in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, by Maxim Rysanov and a chamber orchestra. It is part of his project Maxim Rysanov: In the Company of Schubert, which includes 9 pieces (by Franz Schubert, Dobrinka Tabakova, Leonid Desyatnikov and Sergei Akhunov). They were recorded with the Riga Sinfonietta.

Rob Cowan’s review of the disc in the British magazine Gramophone highlights Tabakova’s work from the outset: First, a name to watch, if you’re not already watching her, that is: Dobrinka Tabakova, Bulgarian-born, a prize-winning pupil of some of the finest living composers and who even now has a significant corpus of work to her name. Maxim Rysanov’s collection ‘In Schubert’s Company’ includes an impressive Tabakova calling card, her Fantasy Homage to Schubert. Even among an elevated community of Schubert transcriptions and visitations – Zender’s Winterreise and Berio’s Rendering, reaching back to Joachim’s Grand Duo and Felix Mottl’s version of the Fantasie for piano duet – Tabakova’s 11 minute tone picture, where ever so gradually the tremulous opening of the violin Fantasie emerges from the mists as if out of a dream, is a stroke of genius. –

The sound in the piece is dark, unreal. Tabakova is captivated by the purity and unadulterated nature of the Austrian composer’s music, which she has been listening to since she was a child. The starting point of her idea is the beginning of Schubert’s Fantasia for violin and piano in C major. The music is inspired, imagistic. The vivid texture with its sense of great cosmic space gradually seems to dissolve into the vibrating clear sonority. The Lied for viola and orchestra fares better, while her Fantasy Homage to Schubert is inspired: sheets of shimmering texture gradually thin to reveal the opening of the C major Fantasie, underpinned by the trill figure, emerging like a precious relic from a lost age.