Georgi Badev

Georgi Badev was born in Vidin in 1939 and studied with Vladimir Avramov after taking his first lessons from his uncle; in a 2007 interview he dated his years at Sofia's boarding school for musically gifted children to 1952–1957. He won first prize at the second national competition for young instrumentalists, and took his diploma from the State Conservatory in 1961. Distinctions came at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1959 and at the Montreal competition in 1966, and he went to the United States to work with Isaac Stern. From 1982 he was professor of violin at the State Conservatory in Sofia, and from 1990 he taught at the Musashino Academy of Music in Tokyo. Sofia Music Weeks opened on 23 May 2007 with a concert in which he was heard as soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic, alongside Ivanka Marinska. He died in 2015. Twentieth-century music was his ground: he gave Bulgarian audiences their first hearing of the violin concertos of Berg, Bartok and Stravinsky, and worked closely with Konstantin Iliev and Dobrin Petkov. Among his recordings are the Brahms sonatas with the pianist Bozhidar Noev.