Lubomir Pipkov

Lyubomir Panaïotov Pipkov (September 6, 1904 – May 9, 1974) was a Bulgarian composer, pianist, and music educator. He is considered among the founders of Bulgaria's modern professional musical establishment and one of its most important composers.

Life Pipkov was born to a musical family in Lovech, Principality of Bulgaria, on September 6, 1904. His father, Panayot Pipkov, was a composer and bandmaster; his grandfather, Hristo Pipkov, was a clarinetist. As a child, Pipkov demonstrated an interest in painting and poetry before turning to music. In 1919 he enrolled in the Sofia Music School (today the Lyubomir Pipkov National School of Music), where he studied under Ivan Torchanov, Heinrich Wiesner, and Dobri Hristov. Two years later he composed the fight song for PFC Levski Sofia, an early composition which was subsequently lost. After graduation, Pipkov composed a number of works, among them his first major score, the 22 Variations for piano.

The 1940s would see Pipkov establish himself at the head of Bulgaria's musical establishment. He began by completing his Symphony No. 1, the first of four, in 1940. Pipkov dedicated the score to the fighters of the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

Aside from his work as a composer and teacher, Pipkov was also active as a poet, critic, He was a board member of the International Society for Music Education. He remained a professor at the National Academy of Music until his death on May 9, 1974.

Music and honors Pipkov composed in a diverse array of genres. Bulgaria commemorated the 100th anniversary of Pipkov's birth by issuing a postage stamp in his honor. The Pipkov Glacier in Antarctica is named after his father and him.

Legacy In his homeland, Pipkov is considered among Bulgaria's greatest composers. In the early 1940s, Tamara Yankova held up his work as an example of an artist who resisted the "modernomania" of the times, instead reaching into the "Bulgarian spirit" to create original music. Edward Greenfield called the composer the "most interesting" of Bulgaria's "middle generation" of composers, specifically singling out Yana's Nine Brothers for orchestration that was "masterly in its beauty". Boris Yarustovsky praised the "daring musico-dramaturgic innovation" and "democratic quality" of the composer's final opera, Antigone '43. The "jaunty, lyrical, somewhat Frenchified" Clarinet Concerto was appraised warmly by Claire Polin, who focused on the composer's handling of the "complex rhtyhmic problems" in the score. On the other hand, Stephen Walsh dismissed Pipkov's Symphony No. 1 as "an amiably nondescript work which might have been written to cool Comrade Zhdanov's heated brow".

Speaking to American interviewers in 1973, Dmitri Shostakovich named Pipkov, along with Sergei Prokofiev and Benjamin Britten, as among those who contributed "excellent" symphonic works in the later 20th century.