Symphony no. 1

Pipkov completed his First Symphony in 1940, eight years after returning from Paris, where he had studied composition with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger at the École normale de musique. He dedicated it to the fighters of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which had ended the previous year — an unambiguous political statement in a country then drifting towards the Axis. The music holds to the modal inflections and asymmetrical metres of Bulgarian song without quoting it, and its contrapuntal density owes as much to his Paris training as to the national school before him.