Alexander Yosifov

Yosifov's catalogue includes operas and ballets, symphonies, instrumental concertos, cantatas and oratorios, piano-duo works, choral and children's music, popular songs and folk arrangements. Born in Sofia in 1940, son of the composer and conductor Yosko Yosifov, he studied at the music school in Varna and then at the Bulgarian State Conservatoire — composition with Pancho Vladigerov, conducting with Konstantin Iliev, piano with Zheni Kovacheva — graduating in 1966, and became a professor at the National Academy of Music in 2000. He also wrote for large groups of pianists. The Canon and Toccata for two pianos, sixteen hands took a special prize in Tokyo in 1997; the second Prelude and Fugue for two piano duos won the Kanebo Grand Prix there in 1999; the Symphony-concertante for two piano duos and an ensemble of ten pianos was first played at the Metropolitan Art Space in Tokyo in 2000. His own biography describes its forces as twenty-four pianists playing with forty-eight hands. His children's operas have been staged in Bulgarian opera houses, and The Wonderful Adventures of Toshko Afrikanski ran for five seasons in Gdańsk. He directed the state recording company Balkanton for many years and held the Polish Ministry of Culture's Honorary Cross for Art. He died in 2016. His father was the composer and conductor Yosif Yosifov, one of the founders of the Stara Zagora and Varna operas, and his uncle the internationally known tenor of the 1940s and 1950s Iliya Yosifov; after the music gymnasium in Varna he served in the navy and began there his first attempts at composition, writing a song for the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, which he gave him personally on his visit to Bulgaria and whose score was reported by Bulgarian National Radio in 2020 to be held in a Russian museum of cosmonautics. He received composition prizes in Japan, Italy, Greece, Poland, Yugoslavia, Germany, Russia and Turkey. He belonged to the International Association of Piano Duos in Tokyo and presided over the Vienna Club at the Austrian embassy in Sofia. The Gdańsk run of Toshko Afrikanski reached 437 performances. His directorship of Balkanton ran from 1968 to 1986.