Georgi Andreev

Trained on the gadulka at the folk-music school in Shiroka Laka, from which he graduated in 1988, Georgi Andreev went on to take a composition degree at the National Academy of Music in Sofia in the class of Alexander Tekeliev. He became chief conductor of the National Folklore Ensemble Philip Koutev in 2000 and has written arrangements, choral pieces and dance scores for it. A Melancholy Beauty, commissioned by Varna International, takes as its subject the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews during the Second World War. His music has been heard at the Royal Albert Hall and at Avery Fisher Hall, and he has worked well outside the concert tradition, contributing to film and video-game scores. He was born in Haskovo in 1969. He studied composition with Alexander Tekeliev at the State Academy of Music from 1990 to 1995 and graduated with distinction; Varna International dates his graduation to 1997, while the Sofia Philharmonic biography gives 1995. He was the conductor of the orchestra of the Filip Kutev state ensemble from 1994 to 2000 and its chief conductor from 2000, and he has written many pieces for chamber orchestra, piano pieces and more than four hundred arrangements of Bulgarian traditional songs and instrumental melodies; he received the Dimitar Valchev award for the music of Neshka Robeva's show Between Two Worlds, and he was born in Haskovo on 24 March 1969. Between 1992 and 1994 he conducted the orchestra of the Shiroka Laka school and taught composition and orchestration there, and wrote and arranged for Bulgarian National Radio; in 2009 he was a guest lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He orchestrated music for the games Crysis 2, Crysis 3, Two Worlds and Rise alongside Hans Zimmer, played in concerts with Nigel Kennedy in 2016 and 2017 and with Jean-Luc Ponty, and met Robert Plant during his visit to England, and his music has carried routines of the Bulgarian rhythmic gymnastics team. The Alfred Schnittke Prize for his Piano Sonata and the Golden Lyre came to him, and Haskovo made him an honorary citizen in 2017.