Sofia, Bulgaria, December 2022.
The center of an old city with a new facade, of a society that carries a heavy and dark history with specific bright ‘parts’. Music education is fortunately one of the brightest. The level of musicians and orchestral ensembles is excellent, and this is why European cinema very often records soundtracks in Sofia, or Skopje now, Prague earlier, and so on.
I have been recording with orchestral ensembles in Sofia since 1996, and has collaborated with the best musicians and orchestras, – National Radio Symphony, Philharmonic Orchestra, the Quarto Quartet, Sofia Soloists – but also soloists such as Mario Angelov, Nadejda Tzanova, Ivan Penchev, with orchestra conductors such as Milen Natchev, or now Konstantin Dobroykov, etc.). My perspective on the ability of orchestral ensembles in general has been shaped over these 25 years also via this musical exchange with this group of musicians, and the bar is still being raised…
Orchestral ensembles have a dynamic that is multiplicative rather than additive. In other words, it is not simply the sum of musicians. It is as if a ‘being’ is created that is many times greater than the sum of the people in it, that moves, alternates, transforms and leaps beyond the realism of the moment. Orchestral musicians are incredibly precise and realistic, without thoughts behind the music writing, but through the experience of musical performance they learn to participate in the magical ‘being’ which they are a part of, without stepping on the earth, without being restricted in any way nor being prevented to fly.
It cannot be explained.
The recording with the specific orchestral ensembles of Sofia of a one-hour piece usually takes 8-12 hours in the studio. This is an incredible achievement in and for ‘many realities’… It is difficult to be achieved in many European or Americal Studio orchestras. It is achieved primarily because of the level of the musicians and their musical education which was strict, based on the Russian standard. The musicians’ aesthetic would be expected to be quite narrow and old-fashioned, stuck in the classical past and tradition, rigid. Instead it is touchingly modern, more so than many European countries.
In the suburbs of Sofia, working-class housing, poorly dressed people while expensive cars pass by, living their own magical reality, leaving behind those who ‘didn’t make it’, like in 1920s-30s in the poor areas of Latin America, when the Magical Realism movement started being developed, more or less at the same time as Tango was drafted, being an outcast music genre of the poor immigrants. Social commentary almost non-existent, except through art, the realistic music of realistic musicians who dream of a career abroad but unite ‘without tomorrow’ in the ‘superbeing’ called ‘orchestra’.
