Bulgarian Composer and Pianist. Acclaimed by many as the most influential Bulgarian composer of all time, he was one of the first to successfully combine idioms of Bulgarian folk music and the classical music. The son of a Bulgarian lawyer and politician father and a Russian Jewish mother, he moved with his family to Sofia, Bulgaria in 1910 following his father's death. He began studying music composition with Dobri Hristov, the most distinguished Bulgarian composer of his generation and in 1912 he received a scholarship to study in Berlin, Germany, where he and his twin brother, the violinist Luben Vladigerov, were enrolled at the Staatliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik (now part of the Berlin University of the Arts). In 1920 he graduated from the Academy and twice won the Mendelssohn Prize of the Academy (in 1918 and 1920). He then became the music director at Deutsches Theater in Berlin, working with the renown theatre director Max Reinhardt. He achieved considerable fame in Europe in the 1920s when many of his pieces were published by Universal Edition in Vienna and released on LPs by the German recording company Deutsche Grammophon before being performed throughout Europe and the USA. As a pianist and composer he toured most of the European countries performing mainly his own works. In 1932 he decided to return to Sofia, where he was appointed professor in Piano, Chamber Music and Composition at the State Academy of Music and the following year he became one of the founding members of the Bulgarian Contemporary Music Society. A prolific composer, he turned in a variety of genres including an opera ("Tsar Kaloyan", to a libretto, five piano concertos, two violin concertos, chamber music including string quartet, trio (violin, cello and piano), works and transcriptions for violin and piano and numerous opuses for solo piano, 38 transcriptions of instrumental pieces for instrument and piano, 13 late transcriptions of his earlier works for two pianos, fifty folksong concert arrangements for voice and piano/orchestra, 20 songs for voice and piano, and ten choral songs with piano/orchestra. In 1969 he was awarded the Herder Prize by the University of Vienna. He died at the age of 79. The Bulgarian recording company Balkanton released an edition of his stage and symphony music in four sets of seven LPs each; however, only a very small portion of his works is currently available on CD.
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