Composer
Biography
Boris Karadimchev was appointed chief conductor at the Directorate of Bulgarian Circuses in 1960. Born in Yambol in 1933, he studied conducting with Assen Dimitrov and composition with Pancho Vladigerov at the State Conservatory in Sofia, then worked for the Bulgarian Concert Directorate and for Bulgarian National Television. He composed more than three hundred songs — "White Silence", from 1967, took first prize at Golden Orpheus and was named melody of the year — along with scores for some forty feature films and around a hundred and twenty animated titles; a good many of his children's songs went into the school textbooks. In 1979 he founded the children's vocal group Pim-Pam, which sang his songs together with pop, rock and folk arrangements, toured abroad, and grew into a school of its own. He taught for decades, teaching at the music academy in Sofia, at the Krastyo Sarafov academy of theatre and film, at New Bulgarian University and at the university in Blagoevgrad. Golden Orpheus gave him its lifetime award in 1997, and the Ministry of Culture its Golden Age star in 2013. He died in 2014. He worked at the Bulgarian Concert Directorate and as an editor at Bulgarian National Television, taught harmony at the secondary military music school and in the estrada department of the National Academy of Music and from 1999 was a professor of music at the National Academy of Theatre and Film Arts, and he was the artistic director of the children's vocal group Pim-Pam, for which he wrote dozens of children's songs that became widely popular. His earliest popular work was with the Jazz of the Young in the 1950s, and he later wrote for the beat groups Shturtsite and Srebarnite Grivni and worked closely with Tangra at the turn of the 1980s. Beside the songs stand a piano sonatina of 1960, a horn concerto of 1961, the fantasy Proxima for piano and orchestra, and an Adagio and Fugue built on Yesterday and Let It Be. He won a prize at Sochi in 1967 and Golden Orpheus awards in 1967, 1977 and 1979, and animated films carrying his scores received awards at Cannes for Zhenitba in 1985 and at Bilbao in 1998.