CAREERISTS Musical in three acts by Parashkev Hadzhiev

Musical in three acts by Parashkev Hadzhiev

Libretto - Bancho Banov

On the comedy of the same name by Ivan Vazov

 

Conductor-director - IVAN KOZHUKHAROV

Director - ALEXANDER TEKELIEV

Set design - IVAN TOKADZHIEV

Costume Designer - Chavdar Chomakov

Choir Conductor  - NEVENA MIHAYLOVA

Dancing - GALINA KALCHEVA

Concertmaster - JORDAN KOVACHEV

Assistant Director - DARINA GLAVANAKOVA-BAKARDZHIEVA

Souffleur - DORA FURTUNOVA

 

Actors:

 

Nikola Baltov, Minister

Anichka, his daughter

Grandma Donna, Balt's mother

Stancho Kwasnikov, a relative of Balt; middle-aged

Chorov, young man, mean and thoughtless

Bozdugansky, a middle-aged man, loud and feathery

Terzi, nice lady, fashionably dressed

Sheikova, a high society lady

Polixena, a relative of Baltov, an aging girl

Parking, girl; a maid in Baltov

Elijah, a soldier, formerly a newsman

Dramkov, the newspaper

Chalkanov, MP

Kakavidov, small, ragged, battered man

The action took place in Sofia in the early twentieth century.

 

            On April 14, 2013, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great Bulgarian composer Professor Parashkev Hadzhiev, a prominent music theorist and educator, an extremely erudite personality, came to an end. With its diverse creative, pedagogical and social activities, it is undoubtedly one of the names that shaped the professional image of Bulgarian music and Bulgarian musical culture in the mid-twentieth century.

            Parashkev Hadzhiev is fortunate to be born into a musical family - his father Todor Hadzhiev is one of the founders of the Opera Company, a pianist who accompanied all the guest and native singers before the war, a composer who created the most popular operetta - Sofia in Bucharest - through the 1920s, and his mother Doychinka Kolarova was one of the first Bulgarian opera singers.

            From a young age, Parashkev Hadzhiev played the piano with Ivan Torchanov and Andrey Stoyanov, and at 18, he made his first compositional attempts but allowed only the works he created after 1940 to be published. He graduated from the Academy of Music in the piano class of Andrey Stoyanov. He is studying composition with Pancho Vladigerov, who has recently returned from Europe and shares with his student all new and deserving attention from the music world of the Old Continent. While a student, Hadjiev founded the Children's Song band at Radio Sofia, for which he produced many songs and radio plays. One year he specialized in composition in Vienna at Marx, and in the period 1938-1940 - at the Higher School of Music in Berlin at Thiesen. There he composed his first chamber works.

            After returning to Bulgaria, Parashkev Hadzhiev was a professor of harmony at the Music Academy, and since 1947, for more than 40 years, he has been a professor of harmony and composition. He is the author of textbooks on harmony and elementary theory.

            From 1990 to 1992 Parashkev Hadzhiev was the President of the Union of Bulgarian Composers.

            He is the most productive Bulgarian composer of music and stage works: he is the author of 21 operas, 6 operettas, and 3 musicals, 1 ballet; there are more than 150 productions, representing a representative part of the national repertoire of the Bulgarian opera and opera theaters after the mid-1950s; some have been placed in other countries, such as Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Russia. Parashkev Hadzhiev is the creator of symphonic and chamber music; more than 500 choral and mass songs, more than 1000 children's and school songs, 20 entertaining, more than 5000 harmonizations of folk songs; music for feature films and more. Much of his work has been published. His works are repertoire for native performers and are invariably used in pedagogical practice. Parashkev Hadzhiev is the recipient of the highest state awards and honors.

 

            With the premiere of the most frequently staged Bulgarian musical - "Servants of God" by Parashkev Hadzhiev (libretto by Bancho Banov, based on the comedy by Ivan Vazov) - dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the composer, State Opera - Burgas manages to satisfy several strategic goals simultaneously: to draw attention to the current repertoire title with a classic literary basis for our social reality, to celebrate the anniversary of one of the most famous Bulgarian composers and - last but not least - to give is the due respect for the theatrical traditions, undoubtedly neglected in recent years.

            "Service, service - small, big, no better than you!" - the refrain, written by librettist Bancho Banov more than 40 years ago, still finds its projection in Bulgarian society today. Like the characters of Vazov (in which both the naivete and the artful manipulator coexist, the gullible good guy and the unscrupulous careerist) - the lustrous servant, the manipulator and the self-proclaimed poet, the "irresistibly charming bonvivan" servants - the "modest" provincial relative of the minister Baltov Stancho Kvasnikov (one of the emblematic for the post-liberation era "little people" for whom the pathos of the past, heroism and sublime Over the small, they remained alien at the expense of the enviable adaptability and urgency and ability to adapt to the circumstances. replies: "I hung them on a nail." discreetly spin the worldly intrigues in her salon, Terzijska - servant woman, "femme ingenue" with a provincial but calculating mentality and rather dubious in terms of patriarchal morality, Polyxena - grotesque image par excellence - crooked, crooked and thunderous with absurd behavior, the subtle couple Stoyanka - Iliycho (a kind of copy of Ivan and Yanka from "Bulgarians of old-time"). All these colorful images - in fact, they are not from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries but are among us, and their world - this highly hierarchized, sadly ridiculous world of unprincipled and decadent morals - resembles our present quite frankly. This predetermines the decision of the show as a retro-parody of the national-comedy of morals (from the beginning of the twentieth century), with topical references to modern times. The director's idea is to definitively debunk the theatrical illusion, focusing on the contemporary message of the play that everything we see on stage is in fact about real life. "We give the audience the opportunity to enjoy a fresh and joking look at the eternal theme of power, excessive ambition, greed, conformism and striving for managerial positions and blue-collar positions," is the point of view of director Alexander Tekeliev. "When ruling, one has to take responsibility for everything. Both the positives and the negatives. There is a Spanish saying: "If you want to dance, you have to endure and be pressured." The laughter that the incarnations of unprincipled careers and careerism, both onstage and in life, is not really a humorous laugh, but a bitter laugh through tears. "