Romeo Smilkov

Romeo Smilkov finished the Lyubomir Pipkov school of music and the Bulgarian State Conservatoire, and perfected his playing in the classes of Nina Aladjem, Lyuba Encheva and Milena Mollova, specialising afterwards with Vera Gornostaeva. He is a prizewinner of the competitions at Salerno and Tokyo, and he concertises steadily in Italy, the former Soviet republics, Hungary, Austria and Japan. He teaches as an assistant at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in Plovdiv and as an associate at the National Academy of Music in Sofia. Smilkov appeared as a piano soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. He was born in Chirpan on 7 July 1960, and the specialisation with Gornostaeva dates from 1986. A doctorate in musicology followed in 2012, on the piano music of Nikolai Stoykov, and his teaching has also taken in the music schools of Stara Zagora and Plovdiv and the New Bulgarian University, while more than nine hundred concert appearances have carried him through sixteen countries of Europe and Asia. In 2016 he played the piano variations of Mozart's Viennese decade complete for the first time.