Kostadin Genchev

Kostadin Genchev, born in Gabrovo in 1969, took up the kaval at ten and went on to the Filip Kutev music school in Kotel, graduating in 1988; much later, in 2016, he completed a master's degree in composition at the National Academy of Music in Sofia under Krasimir Taskov. His professional life began in 1990 with the folk ensemble in Sliven and, briefly, with the Filip Kutev Ensemble itself. Since 1993 he has been a soloist, orchestra member, composer and arranger with the Folk Orchestra of Bulgarian National Radio, for which he has written more than eight hundred song arrangements and over a hundred instrumental pieces. As part of the instrumental group of The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices he has toured Europe, Asia and Latin America. He founded the ethno-music groups Bulgara and Wild River, has composed for the folk ensembles of Pleven and Yambol and for Ethnorhythm in Plovdiv, wrote the music for the Chinari show The Boyars of Dance in 2013 and, the same year, the folk part of Neshka Robeva's Midsummer Mystery. With Bulgara he won the Askeer award for theatre music in 2005. He appeared as kaval soloist in the gala concert for 24 May 2009 at the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, which Nayden Todorov conducted with the Sofia Philharmonic. Born in Gabrovo on 14 December 1969, he graduated in composition in the class of Krassimir Taskov at the National Academy of Music in 2016 and began his orchestral career in 1990 with the folk song and dance ensemble of Sliven. He founded Bulgara with Kiril Dobrev in 2002, and the quartet Wild River with Dimitar Hristov in 2008; the first issued Mecha svatba in 2006, the second a record of its own in 2010. Bulgarian television had filmed two programmes of his arrangements in 1995 and 1998, and he later wrote the music for the Chinari show The Magic of Dance in 2009, played kaval on the EVA Quartet's Arkata with Hector Zazou, and worked in the Belonoga project of his wife, the singer Gergana Dimitrova. A second prize in the national competition for symphonic writing in irregular metres followed in 2016.