Йовчо Крушев

Yovcho Krushev has divided a long career between the piano, composition, theory and teaching, and the four have kept feeding one another. He has given hundreds of solo recitals, appeared with every symphony orchestra in Bulgaria and played in some thirty countries, and he came to that platform through the competition circuit: he was a laureate of the Tchaikovsky in Moscow, of the Viotti in Vercelli and of the Varallo-Valsesia. His repertoire reaches from the classics to music written a few weeks earlier — a substantial part of his recorded work is contemporary, and a number of pieces have been composed for him and given their first performance by him, among them Alexander Yosifov's Fifth Piano Concerto. His own catalogue runs to chamber, solo, choral and symphonic works, church music and scores for the theatre, and it has been played in Italy, Japan, Greece, Germany, Cyprus, Turkey, Hungary and Russia; he is a laureate of international composition competitions and a member of the Union of Bulgarian Composers. The Ministry of Culture, the union of musicians and dancers and Radio FM Classic gave him the Crystal Lyre for a peak achievement in performance. He teaches in the piano department of the National Academy of Music in Sofia and also in its conducting and composition chairs, and has served as its Vice-Rector; his students frequently appear on the platform beside him, and several now teach at the academy themselves or perform and teach abroad. He has appeared as soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic across a decade of seasons from 2004. He received a special prize at the fourth national review of the schools of the arts in Bulgaria in 1973 and was admitted specially to the National Academy of Music in 1974, though below the minimum age of eighteen, in 1977 became an active member of the Musica agency of the Ministry of Culture and graduated from the Bulgarian State Conservatory in piano with Julia and Konstantin Ganev in 1979 and in composition; born in Popovo on 1 September 1957, his career spans more than two thousand appearances across the world. After the piano diploma he entered the composition class of Alexander Raichev and took orchestral conducting as an elective with Vladi Simeonov, then spent 1979 to 1981 in the Ganevs' piano masterclass. His teaching at the academy began in 1987 and covers piano, composition and score reading, he was Vice-Rector from 2002 to 2008, and his students have taken more than fifty prizes at Bulgarian and international competitions. A good deal of his playing has been recorded for Bulgarian National Radio.