I do hope that this fine new recording will mean that Pancho Vladigerov’s music becomes better known. There are recordings, but they are not easily available, and even the two discs of his music made by CPO are no longer available. His work was once very well known indeed both in and outside his native country, and in spite of being Bulgaria’s most famous national composer, he had a cosmopolitan background, having been born in Switzerland (where his grandfather, a relation of Boris Pasternak, had settled), and studied in Berlin before settling definitively in Sofia in 1932.

Vladigerov’s music may be broadly described as ‘romantic nationalist’; he makes much use of folk material from his native country, as the titles of both Seven Symphonic Bulgarian Dances and Bulgarian Suite would suggest, but in combination with a tremendous gift for orchestration: his setting of Bulgarian folk music in a broadly Western European context was effectively the crystallisation of the tradition of art music in a Bulgaria only recently liberated from Ottoman domination (the Third Bulgarian State was proclaimed in 1878).

In many ways, the most impressive work here (as well as the earliest and the best known) is the Vardar Rhapsody, originally written in 1922 for violin and piano and entitled Balgarska rapsodiya ‘Vardar’, a powerful evocation of the River Vardar, which runs from Vrutok in what is now North Macedonia to the Aegean Sea. Performances are excellent, and particularly inspired in the variegated colours of the Bulgarian Suite. One is inspired to hope Naxos might follow this up with recordings of some of Vladigerov’s five piano concertos and two violin concertos.