Balkan Overture

The Sofia Philharmonic's register lists this work of Petko Staynov as a concert overture, and it stands beside the Youth Overture among his few pieces in that form. Staynov, blind from childhood, trained in Dresden and returned to Kazanlak in 1924; he wrote two symphonies, symphonic poems and choral ballads, and later headed the Institute of Music at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The title names the mountain range that runs the length of the country, a subject Bulgarian composers of the interwar decades treated as national landscape rather than as picturesque scenery.