Song (Bulgarian Suite, op. 21)

Vladigerov wrote the Bulgarian Suite, op. 21, in Berlin in the second half of the 1920s, and it is the work in which his national manner is first fully laid out. Its movements move between village dance and lyric song; the Song was lifted out of the suite and given a separate life in transcriptions for violin, cello and other instruments — David Oistrakh played it, and it is heard far more often than the complete suite. The material is not collected folklore. Vladigerov wrote his own melodies in the idiom and harmonised them with the chromatic language he had absorbed in Germany.