Marin Valtchanov (1949–2017) composed his concerto for clarinet and orchestra in 1992. He was himself a bassoonist — a graduate of the State Academy of Music in Sofia in 1973, professor there from 1998 — and his catalogue is weighted toward wind instruments. The clarinet concerto belongs to the group of concertante works he produced in the years after 1989, when Bulgarian composers were writing for a concert life that had lost its state commissioning system.