Adagio

Kyurkchiyski wrote the Adagio for string orchestra in 1959, while still a student of Pancho Vladigerov at the State Academy of Music in Sofia and before the period of specialisation in Moscow with Shostakovich that followed. It is an early work and a short one, built on a sustained line over slow-moving harmony, and it belongs to the strand of his output furthest from the folk arrangements for which he became internationally known.