Rashko Mladenov

Two trainings shaped Rashko Mladenov and he has used both: piano at the Lyubomir Pipkov music school in Sofia with Lidia Kuteva, acting at VITIZ in the class of Zhelcho Mandadzhiev. The double formation runs through the work — Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Maître Bridaine in Musset's No Trifling with Love, Tuzenbach and later Vershinin in Three Sisters, alongside stage scores of his own, among them music for the Musset and for Kipling's Just So Stories. Born in Sofia in February 1947, he has acted at the Ruse theatre, the Satirical Theatre, Theatre Sofia, the Youth Theatre and the Malak Gradski Teatar Zad Kanala, and has directed the Satirical Theatre and the Sava Ognyanov Drama Theatre in Ruse; in 1994 he taught piano at an arts school in Mexico City, and from 2006 to 2009 he worked at the Bulgarian Cultural Centre in Moscow. With Itzhak Fintzi he pressed the company of Theatre Sofia into mounting Rigoletto as a piece of theatre; with Fintzi, Todor Kolev and Nikolay Binev he gave a long series of concerts with the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Alexander Vladigerov under the title April Fool's Concert, the four of them playing, singing and conducting by turns. An anniversary concert filled Bulgaria Hall on 1 October 2017, in the year he turned seventy, and he appeared in it not only as its subject but as a performer. The Raskolnikov was staged by Krasimir Spasov, the Musset by Margarita Mladenova, and the two Chekhov roles came under Leon Daniel and Armen Dzhigarkhanyan respectively; his theatre scores also include one for The Tavern under the Green Tree. The April Fool's Concert series ran to twenty-five evenings.