CultureLoad

The New Symphony Orchestra Sofia was founded in 1991 by the music critic Julia Hristova, its current president. The orchestra was established as an alternative organisation to the state subsidized cultural institutions in Bulgaria. It recruits young musicians offering them professional field, where sharing their skills, new chances and opportunities to play music and create a flowering of more kinds of music in more people’s lives. Since 1997 the orchestra is directed by Rossen Milanov.

Mila Georgieva (violin) was born in Bulgaria in 1976. She began playing the violin at the age of four and even before she reached her teens she had a worldwide reputation, winning two prizes in competitions in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, touring in Spain, Holland, the Philippines, Singapore, India and China, appearing on Italian, French and Swiss television. Fittingly, her Grand Prize, in Bologna, was named for another violin playing prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Miss Georgieva is studying at the Juilliard School in the United States. Miss Georgieva has performed with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig under Kurt Masur, the orchestras of Bulgarian and Dutch Radio & Television, the Sofia Philharmonic and Sofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra Budapest and the RIAS Symphony Orchestra Berlin. She has toured Germany, South America and Japan and already appeared with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under Richard Hickox and toured in France with the Orchestre National des pays de la Loire under Herbert Soudain. She was invited by the Houston Symphony and performed with Christoph Eschenbach at the Ravinia Summer Festival.

Rossen Milanov is one of two conductors of the New Symphony Orchestra Sofia. He currently works at academies and orchestras in the United States and Bulgaria. Mr. Milanov won many awards ("Orchestra of the Year 1998" for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, "Adventurous Programing" for originality in concert programing of the American Symphony Orchestras League a.o.) and teaches at the State Musical Academy Sofia, the Juilliard School New York and the Curtis Institute of Music Philadelphia. He is the music director of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra - and: The New Symphony Orchestra Sofia. He toured with the Colorado Symphony, the Lima Symphony Orchestra, the Sofia Festival Orchestra, for example, and performed at the Grant Park Music Festival (Chicago), Recontres Musicales d´Evian (France) and the New Year´s Festival (Sofia). Mr. Milanov is cover conductor for Franz-Welser Most with the Cleveland Orchestra and member of the conducting facility of Juilliard School.

"... One need not to perform concerts for the sake of biography of vanity and narcissism. You have to be incredibly honest towards Music, towards your colleagues, because all together you will burn with desire of creating something really beautiful. One should not be forced playing brilliant music, as should not be forced falling in love. You have to dissolve yourself in Music, reveal yourself, and take out the intimate capacity, to the end, at last to devote yourself. And that is what means to be in love with Music..."

Rossen Milanov