Martin Georgiev
*19 December 1983
Works by Martin Georgiev
Biography
Das Orchester 5***** "The CD debut of the young Bulgarian-British musician Martin Georgiev brings us an entirely individual musical narrative world, from London. In it, heaven and earth are reflected."
Limelight Magazine **** “a triumph… bold, sophisticated compositional vision executed with brilliance.”
London-based composer, conductor, percussionist and producer born in 1983 at Varna, completed PhD in Composition and Postgraduate Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Composer in Residence of the City of Heidelberg (Komponist für Heidelberg 2012|13), BBC Symphony Orchestra Embedded Composer 2010-11, Laureate of the TACTUS International Composers’ Forum in Brussels, Belgium (2004, 2008 and 2011 selection), the Composition Grand Prize of the Sofia National Philharmonic Orchestra, UBC Golden Stave Award and over 20 more awards and scholarships. Georgiev's compositions have been performed by the Brussels Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Mozart Players, Covent Garden Soloists, Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra, Sofia National Philharmonic Orchestra, National Orchestra of Belgium, Kammerorkest van het Noorden, Azalea, Ukranian Festival Orchestra, Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Deutschladfunk, NPO4, Rete Toscana Classica, the Hungarian National Radio and the Bulgarian National Radio amongst many, conducted by Michel Tabachnik, Fabien Gabel, Rossen Milanov, Jessica Cottis, Pascal Rophé, Vania Moneva, Franck Ollu, Gary Walker, and others, often featuring the composer himself who, as a conductor, has appeared with orchestras, Ballet and Opera companies and ensembles across Europe and Australia. He is currently Staff Conductor at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden, London, where he has been working since 2013 and conducted over 50 shows in flagship classical and contemporary productions.
Official Website: www.martingeorgiev.net
About the music
Limelight Magazine **** : "Monumental and explosive, it is also full of extraordinary delicacy"
Sound and Vision : “unlike anything else I have heard before”
Fanfare: "Sophisticated, uncompromising yet sonically appealing, the music of British-Bulgarian composer Martin Georgiev (b. 1983) promises to be a prominent voice on the musical landscape. … The recording … is superb. Georgiev is a major new voice"
Pizzicato *** “pictorial and full of fantasy”
Music Web International : “Music with an invitingly gruff and swirling strangeness that trumps and transcends its occasional avant-garde sounds.”
Concerto.net: "a mélange of searing and oft-untamed commentaries, to pay tribute to those men and women who have fought and are currently fighting valiantly against this plague."
Financial Times*** "zestily played by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Martin Georgiev's exuberant baton"
The Times*** "rousing orchestral music from the Royal Ballet Sinfonia under Martin Georgiev's baton"
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Martin Georgiev's music is underpinned by a particular system/method/technique developed within his PhD in Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, University of London (2008-2013, supervised by Professor Philip Cashian with subsidiary supervision by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Julian Anderson and Sir Harrison Birtwistle). This technique, termed Morphing Modality, is a systematic approach to key aspects of the process of music composition, inspired by the technique of morphing images from the visual arts, integrating fundamental principles from the theory and practice of Bulgarian-Orthodox and Byzantine Chant, and informed by music psychology, perception and cognition. It allows for a significant degree of flexibility in the use of consonance and dissonance, semitonal and mircotonal elements within the general framework of particular linear Morphing Polyphony. It permeates all his output within the last decade, with fluctuations of emphasis, complexity and simplicity.
