Prominent musicians from the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra and young talents from Pioneer Youth Philharmonic will today perform a joint concert in Bulgaria Concert Hall downtown Sofia under the motto "Side by Side". For several years now, the series has brought together musicians from the two orchestras collaborating on interesting projects.

This time their joint programme will feature Concerto for violin and orchestra by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky with soloist Filip Filipov and Symphony No. 1 by prominent Bulgarian composer Petko Staynov. On the conductor’s podium the audience will see Hristo Hristov who has been working with the youth orchestra for several months now. This will also be his first official concert conducting Pioneer Youth Philharmonic. Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto is one the most frequently performed works of the great Russian composer. As for Petko Staynov’s symphony, we have to say that it is little known even to music experts in Bulgaria. According to the event organizers, it has not been performed for more than half a century now. The last recording registered with the Bulgarian National Radio dates from the celebration of the composer’s 70^th anniversary.

Here's some background: Petko Staynov completed this work in 1945 when he was almost 50 years old. Until that point, he had already accumulated considerable experience in the field of choral music, even remaining in Bulgarian music history as the father of the choral ballad. By the mid-1940s, he had also created many symphonic works, including Symphonic Scherzo, the Balkan concert overture, the symphonic poems Legend and Thrace, the symphonic suite A Fairy Tale ... and the extremely popular Thracian Dances suite, one of his first compositions after graduating from the Dresden Conservatory of Music and returning to his native town of Kazanlak in Central Bulgaria. Staynov’s Thracian Dances or fragments of them are invariably on the repertoire of all Bulgarian orchestras, including the Pioneer Youth Philharmonic. With it, the young musicians have repeatedly earned the applause of domestic and international audiences, ever since the time when the conductor’s baton was in the hands of Professor Vladi Simeonov, a renowned Bulgarian conductor and pedagogue who founded the children’s and youth band in 1952.

Without neglecting the solo concert in the rendition of one truly talented and successful young Bulgarian violinist, the presence of Petko Staynov’s Symphony No. 1 in the programme of tonight’s concert is a real event. "This is a large-scale work with a truly Bulgarian sound - both in terms of its melody as well as its metrical and rhythmic composition. It is a piece worth being heard,” says Assoc. Prof. Alexander Peshev, Artistic Director of Pioneer Youth Philharmonic.