Piano Concert by Romeo Smilkov

The Cultural Centre “Technopolis 20” presents the renowned Bulgarian pianist Romeo Smilkov for a concert, on Tuesday, September the 27th at 8 pm. The audience will have the opportunity to enjoy a programme for solo piano that includes works by W.A. Mozart, L.V. Beethoven and F. Liszt.

The works to be presented have something in common: all of them were written during the last creative years of these three composers who were remarkable performing pianists as well. The program explores the stylistic, structural and technical evolution of their clavier work, which influences the development of the contemporary piano music.

The set of 8 variations of W. A. Mozart, “Ein Weib ist das herrlichste Ding” (A Wife is the Most Glorious Thing) in F major, KV 613 is based on a theme of the singspiel Der “Dumme Gartner” by Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist of the great Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute”. The variations were composed during the year of his premature death in 1791 and they are his last keyboard cyclic work. The instrumental genius of Mozart reaches a different melodic, textural and harmonic level in this masterpiece.

The second piece of the recital is a colossus of the piano literature - Sonata op.106, named by Beethoven “Große Sonate für das Hammerklavier“. The lengthiest of his sonatas, Hammerklavier was written during 1817 and 1818. It was published almost at the same time in Vienna and London. The Vienna’s edition consists of four movements and lasts for more than forty minutes. However, Beethoven offers a second edition, published in London in December 1819. This particular version offers a traditional three movement’s sonata. The middle movement – Adagio Sostenuto is the last slow movement of Beethoven’s piano sonata which lasts for more than 12 minutes. Biographer William Kinderman calls the Hammerklavier “a pivotal work of the late style”.

One of the best performers of Hammerklavier ever was the great Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Apparently the sonatas of Beethoven provided an enormous influence to Liszt’s own sonatas and the development of the genre during the Romanticism. At the end of the recital, Romeo Smilkov will perform three of the last compositions of Liszt. The first one is the “impressionistic” “Grey Clouds” (Trübe Wolken/Nuages Gris), created in 1881. The second piece is the tragic Unstern! –Sinistre! (Disastro!), written in 1886 and considered to be the very last work of Liszt. The final piece of the recital is the emblematic Hungarian Rhapsody No 18, written for the Ungarische Ausstellung in Budapest in 1885.

Tickets: 10 euro / 6 euro (students)
Reservations are necessary at 70002420.

A few words about Romeo Smilkov
Romeo Smilkov was born on the 7th July, 1960 in Chirpan, Bulgaria. A graduate of the National Music Academy “Prof. Pancho Vladigerov” in Sofia, he studied piano with Prof. Luba Encheva and Prof. Milena Mollova. Among his postgraduate studies was a master class with Prof. Vera Gornostaeva (Moscow) at the Varna Festival in Bulgaria.

He won numerous international and national prizes such as 1st Prize of the Salerno Piano Competition in Italy (1979); 2nd Prize of the Razgrad Piano Competition, Bulgaria (1984) and 3rd Prize of the Liszt-Bartok Competition (1989), organized by The Hungarian Cultural Center in Sofia. In 2011, he received the Special Prize “Medeniya Tchan” of the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts, Plovdiv. He also participated in the First International Piano Competition in Tokyo, Japan (1980), in the Tchaikovsky Piano Competition – Moscow, Russia (1982) and in the Liszt Competition/Festival in Budapest, Hungary (1986).

Romeo Smilkov has given more than 800 concerts in Bulgaria and in eleven countries of Europe and Asia (Russia, Japan, China and others). He appeared as a soloist with numerous orchestras in Bulgaria and abroad.

His passion for teaching brought him to the secondary music schools in Stara Zagora (1983-1989) and in Plovdiv (1994-1997), both in South Bulgaria. He worked as an assistant of Prof. Milena Mollova at her piano classes at the National Music Academy in Sofia from 1991 to 1993.

Since 1991, Romeo Smilkov has been teaching piano at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. From 2014, he is a piano Professor at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts and at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia.

In 2012, he obtained his PhD for the theoretical research on the piano compositions of the Bulgarian composer Nikolay Stoykov. He has published three books as a result of his research in the field of the Bulgarian clavier music.

Romeo Smilkov is one of the most outstanding pianists of his generation. His vast repertoire spans from Frescobaldi to Ligeti. He is a passionate performer of contemporary Bulgarian composers such as Dimitar Nenov (c.1902-1953), Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978), Lazar Nikolov (1922-2005), Ivan Spassov (1934-1996), Nikolay Stoykov (1936), Vladimir Pantchev (1949), Georgi Arnaudov (1957). Many compositions were written especially for him. Romeo Smilkov presented for a first time in Bulgaria compositions by the Austrian composer Christian Utz and the Lithuanian composer Mikalojus Ciurlionis.

Romeo Smilkov released three solo albums for recording companies such as the American MMO, the Danish label Danacord Records and others. In March, 2016 he recorded the piano works of the Bulgarian pianist and composer Dimitar Nenov in Fazioli Hall in Sasile, Italy for the Greek label Arco.

Prof. Smilkov has held piano master classes at the Music Academy in Gdansk, Poland (2009), G. Tartini Conservatory in Trieste, Italy (2010), Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius, Lithuania (2011), Music Department of Istanbul Technical University, Turkey (2012), Harbin University in China (2012), Academy of Arts in Iasi, Romania (2014), Technopolis in Pafos, Cyprus (2015), Academy of Music in Wroclaw, Poland (2016). Between 2012- 2016, he was a Dean of the Department “Piano and accordion” in The Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in Plovdiv.