Nestinarka

Nestinarka was composed in 1940 and first staged in Sofia in 1942, and it made Marin Goleminov famous overnight; he was thirty-four. The dance drama takes its subject from the fire-dancing rituals of south-eastern Bulgaria, in which barefoot dancers cross live coals on the feast of Saints Constantine and Helena. Goleminov built the score on the modes and irregular metres of the region rather than on quotation. It became the most widely performed Bulgarian stage work abroad, given in more than fifty countries, and a suite from it entered the concert repertoire.