Lazar Nikolov plays his own Piano Sonata No. 1 (1950)

The great Bulgarian composer Lazar Nikolov performs his own Sonata for Piano No. 1 (comp. 1950) (Studio recording, 1959) Lazar Nikolov (1922-2005), together with Konstantin Iliev was a founder of Bulgaria’s postwar avant-garde, and among the first composers in Eastern Europe to subscribe to a modernist aesthetic and to the use of atonal techniques. His compositional aesthetic ran counter to the doctrines of the communist regime, which was particularly oppressive at the start of his career in the late 1940s. For most of his professional life his work was censored. In 1946 Nikolov completed his formal education at the Bulgarian State Music Academy, having studied the piano and composition with Dimitar Nenov and composition, briefly, with Pancho Vladigerov. In addition to Nenov, Nikolov’s early influences included Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and Hindemith. Like Iliev he rejected folk music sources and the late Romantic style of Vladigerov, avoiding epic forms in favor of a more modest scale, a more economical means of expression, and clear-cut, linear textures. In early works such as the First Piano Sonata (1950) and Second Piano Sonata (1951) Nikolov employed classical forms and polyphony. The bulk of his output was instrumental; he preferred instrumental to vocal forces to express purely abstract musical ideas. His first successful composition and the beginnings of an evolving, individual style was his Concerto for String Orchestra (1949). Following its première the work was criticized harshly by the authorities but quickly gained widespread popularity. Throughout the 1960s he experimented with instrumental timbre, controlled aleatoric elements, and highly virtuoso techniques, as evidenced in the First String Quartet (1965) and Piano Reflections (Пианистични отблясъци,1972). A special place in his compositional output has been reserved for the sonata, a genre he has regularly employed. His piano sonatas (1950–91), in particular, document the various stages of his style. In his later sonatas, as well as other works, Nikolov makes extensive use of aleatoric techniques, tone clusters, glissandi played directly on the strings, and other coloristic effects. The freer sections, however, are controlled by means of detailed instructions to the performer.