London, Cadogan Hall and King's Place: Second London Festival of Bulgarian Culture

One of the most enjoyable characteristics of London musical life is that it is peopled by a generous number of foreigners who, every so often, take it upon themselves to enlighten the rest of us as to the music we are missing from back home. These can, of course, be hit-and-miss occasions, but it's in the nature of exploring unknown music of any age that you will happily put up with a handful of duds if you come away with a real discovery ringing in your ears. The Second London Festival of Bulgarian Culture (I seem to have missed the First) ran in various venues over the course of November 2012 and also accommodated art, film, literature, theatre and other forms of music (folk, pop and jazz). It opened its classical batting with a concert of ‘Bulgarian and British Symphonic Folk Songs’ in Cadogan Hall on 3 November, with the Varna Symphony Orchestra, Paulina Voices (the choir of St Paul's Girls' School) and the Holst Choir (from James Allen's Girls' School) conducted by Martin Georgiev. Pancho Vladigerov (1899–1978) being the only Bulgarian composer generally known to the outside world, it made sense to begin with him. His Shumen Miniatures, six attractive piano pieces based on folk-tunes from the town, Shumen, where Vladigerov grew up, were written in 1934 and orchestrated at some later date vouchsafed neither by the concert-programme nor the worklist at www.vladigerov.org. They embrace a variety of lighter moods: the first and fourth pieces offer lazy and lyrical summer-evening hazes and the second and third vigorous dances; the proximity of the fifth to the style of Enescu brought a reminder of the long common border Bulgaria shares with Romania (Shumen is around 100 km away from it).