Lyubomir Denev

Born in Vidin in 1951, Denev trained as a percussionist at the Lyubomir Pipkov music school in Sofia and then as an orchestral conductor at the State Music Academy, taking his diploma in 1979 from the class of Konstantin Iliev. From 1977 to 1986 he served on the conducting staff of the Stefan Makedonski State Music Theatre and has stood before the principal Bulgarian symphony orchestras, while as pianist and improviser he performed jazz across Europe and North America. He wrote the first Bulgarian rock musical. Stage works, concert pieces, children's music, film and television scores, songs and arrangements make up his catalogue; the jazz opera Dinner in Manhattan, for four singers and a jazz quartet on stage, was first heard in Sofia in May 2021. He has described himself as a musical nomad. His musical interests date from earliest childhood, when he began violin and accordion lessons, and he finished the Sofia music school in the percussion class of Dobri Paliev in 1971, playing as a pupil in the Pioneer Philharmonic and touring abroad with it and making his first attempts at composition mainly in jazz and pop; from 1973 he studied at the Music Academy in Sofia, working at composition with Tsvetan Tsvetanov and Parashkev Hadjiev, and graduated in 1979. He took further conducting study with Franco Ferrara in Siena in 1980 and with Edward Downes in the Netherlands the following year, and worked at composition with Anatol Vieru in Ruse in 1995. His musical The Law of the Jungle reached Paris in May 1993, four years after Love's Labour Lost was given in Cairo with the Blagoevgrad Chamber Opera. Among his prizes are the Golden Orpheus for a song in 1979, the Askeer for theatre music in 2001, awards at Jihlava and at Intersonanzen in Potsdam, and in 2020 the Ministry of Culture's Golden Century Star.