Tsenko Minkin

Icarus — the Heavenly Anchor, Sofia Impressions and The Bay of Dromos are among Tsenko Minkin's orchestral works. The Bay of Dromos was played in Plovdiv in 2002 and taken up by the Sofia Philharmonic five years later, and his music has also been heard at the opera houses of Plovdiv and Rousse. Born on 11 August 1959, he has led the Union of Bulgarian Composers through the 2020s, a post that puts him at the head of the country's composing profession; his colleague Yasen Kozev, marking his sixty-fifth birthday, described the music as full of fancy and experiment. He studied composition with Alexander Raichev, at twelve made his first recordings for Bulgarian National Radio as a pianist playing his own works, at fifteen wrote a quartet for percussion published by the Musica state publishing house, about which the Ekran studio of Bulgarian National Television made the documentary portrait The Beginning, at nineteen gave his first authored concert of chamber and symphonic works in Sofia and at twenty began to work as a freelance composer, writing film and theatre music, and from 1995 to 1997 he was an adviser on the arts; he was born in Shumen on 11 August 1959. He edited music at Balkanton from 1998 to 2006, helped found the MUSICAUTOR copyright agency and chaired its board from 2009 to 2012, and has presided over the Union of Bulgarian Composers since November 2014, having sat on its board from 1993 and served as its secretary general in 2013. His catalogue passes 130 works, among them the choral-symphonic frescoes Kiprovets 1688, the First Symphony, concertos for violin, trumpet and marimba, and scores for more than fifty films, fifteen of them awarded at international festivals.