Anton Dikov

At eighteen Anton Dikov took sixth prize at the Franz Liszt competition in Budapest, and awards at the Queen Elisabeth competition (for his Bach playing), at Rio de Janeiro and at the Marguerite Long contest in Paris followed within seven years. He had come to them out of Lyuba Encheva's class at the Sofia academy, and worked afterwards in France with Nadia Boulanger and Robert Casadesus. Bach and Beethoven were, by his own account, two composers to whom he remained attached: he recorded the complete Beethoven concertos and Bartók's music for piano and orchestra with the Sofia Philharmonic, and included Beethoven's Fifth Concerto among the works he played early in his career. From 1974 he held a teaching post at the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music in Sofia, gave masterclasses abroad and sat on international competition juries. Born in Sofia in 1938, he died in 2004. He gave the Bulgarian premieres of Bartok's First and Second Piano Concertos and recorded all three. The Sofia appointment of 1974 was as associate professor; the full professorship came in 1988.