Symphony no. 1

Stoyanov was sixty when he wrote his First Symphony, in B minor, in 1962 — late for a composer who already had concertos, operas and the Bay Ganyo suite behind him. Konstantin Iliev conducted the premiere with the Sofia Philharmonic on 1 November 1962, at a concert billed in honour of a party congress; the composer made no such connection himself. The symphony is cast as one large, tightly held movement combining the poem and the cycle, its sections corresponding to the parts of a traditional symphonic structure. Around it, younger Bulgarian composers were writing in far more experimental directions.