The New Symphony Orchestra Sofia
was founded in 1991 by the music critic Julia Hristova, its current president. The orchestra was established as an alternative organisation to the state subsidized cultural institutions in Bulgaria. It recruits young musicians offering them professional field, where sharing their skills, new chances and opportunities to play music and create a flowering of more kinds of music in more people's lives. Since 1997 the orchestra is directed by Rossen Milanov.

Mila Georgieva (violin)
was born in Bulgaria in 1976. She began playing the violin at the age of four and even before she reached her teens she had a worldwide reputation, winning two prizes in competitions in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia, touring in Spain, Holland, the Philippines, Singapore, India and China, appearing on Italian, French and Swiss television. Fittingly, her Grand Prize, in Bologna, was named for another violin playing prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Miss Georgieva is studying at the Juilliard School in the United States. Miss Georgieva has performed with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig under Kurt Masur, the orchestras of Bulgarian and Dutch Radio & Television, the Sofia Philharmonic and Sofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra, the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra Budapest and the RIAS Symphony Orchestra Berlin. She has toured Germany, South America and Japan and already appeared with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich under Richard Hickox and toured in France with the Orchestre National des pays de la Loire under Herbert Soudain. She was invited by the Houston Symphony and performed with Christoph Eschenbach at the Ravinia Summer Festival.

Rossen Milanov
is one of two conductors of the New Symphony Orchestra Sofia. He currently works at academies and orchestras in the United States and Bulgaria. Mr. Milanov won many awards ("Orchestra of the Year 1998" for the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, "Adventurous Programing" for originality in concert programing of the American Symphony Orchestras League a.o.) and teaches at the State Musical Academy Sofia, the Juilliard School New York and the Curtis Institute of Music Philadelphia.
He is the music director of the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard Pre-College Orchestra - and: The New Symphony Orchestra Sofia. He toured with the Colorado Symphony, the Lima Symphony Orchestra, the Sofia Festival Orchestra, for example, and performed at the Grant Park Music Festival (Chicago), Recontres Musicales d´Evian (France) and the New Year´s Festival (Sofia). Mr. Milanov is cover conductor for Franz-Welser Most with the Cleveland Orchestra and member of the conducting facility of Juilliard School.

"... One need not to perform concerts for the sake of biography of vanity and narcissism. You have to be incredibly honest towards Music, towards your colleagues, because all together you will burn with desire of creating something really beautiful. One should not be forced playing brilliant music, as should not be forced falling in love. You have to dissolve yourself in Music, reveal yourself, and take out the intimate capacity, to the end, at last to devote yourself. And that is what means to be in love with Music..."

Rossen Milanov

Ludwig van Beethoven
was born in Bonn (Germany), baptized 17 December 1770. He died in Vienna (Austria), 26 March 1827.
He wrote the Violin Concert, op. 61 in 1806. During the same period, he also composed the IVth concert for piano, the IVth symphony, the "Razumovski" quartets. The violin concert was dedicated to Stephan fon Breining and was performed for the first time by Frenz Klement.
He studied first with his father, Johann, a singer and instrumentalist in the service of the Elector of Cologne at Bonn, but mainly with C.G. Neefe, court organist. At 11 ½ he was able to deputize for Neefe; at 12 he had some music published. In 1787 he went to Vienna, but quickly returned on hearing that his mother was dying. Five years later he went back to Vienna, where he settled. He pursued his studies, first with Haydn, but there was some clash of temperaments and Beethoven studied too with Schenk, Albrechtsberger and Salieri. Until 1794 he was supported by the Elector at Bonn but he found patrons among the music-loving Viennese aristocracy and soon enjoyed success as a piano virtuoso, playing at private houses or palaces rather than in public. His public debut was in 1795; about the same time his first important publications appeared, three piano trios op.l and three piano sonatas op.2. As a pianist, it was reported, he had fire, brilliance and fantasy as well as depth of feeling. It is naturally in the piano sonatas, writing for his own instrument, that he is at his most original in this period; the Pathetique belongs to 1799, the Moonlight ('Sonata quasi una fantasia') to 1801, and these represent only the most obvious innovations in style and emotional content. These years also saw the composition of his first three piano concertos, his first two symphonies and a set of six string quartets op.l8.

1802, however, was a year of crisis for Beethoven, with his realization that the impaired hearing he had noticed for some time was incurable and sure to worsen. That autumn, at a village outside Vienna, Heiligenstadt, he wrote a will-like document, addressed to his two brothers, describing his bitter unhappiness over his affliction in terms suggesting that he thought death was near. But he came through with his determination strengthened and entered a new creative phase, generally called his 'middle period'. It is characterized by a heroic tone, evident in the Eroica Symphony (no.3, originally to have been dedicated not to a noble patron but to Napoleon), in Symphony no.5, where the sombre mood of the c Minor first movement ('Fate knocking on the door') ultimately yields to a triumphant C Major finale with piccolo, trombones and percussion added to the orchestra, and in his opera Fidelio. Here the heroic theme is made explicit by the story, in which (in the post-French Revolution 'rescue opera' tradition) a wife saves her imprisoned husband from murder at the hands of his oppressive political enemy. The three string quartets of this period, op.59, are similarly heroic in scale: the first, lasting some 45 minutes, is conceived with great breadth, and it too embodies a sense of triumph as the intense f Minor Adagio gives way to a jubilant finale in the major embodying (at the request of the dedicatee, Count Razumovsky) a Russian folk melody.

Fidelio, unsuccessful at its premiere, was twice revised by Beethoven and his librettists and successful in its final version of 1814. Here there is more emphasis on the moral force of the story. It deals not only with freedom and justice, and heroism, but also with married love, and in the character of the heroine Leonore, Beethoven's lofty, idealized image of womanhood is to be seen. He did not find it in real life he fell in love several times, usually with aristocratic pupils (some of them married), and each time was either rejected or saw that the woman did not match his ideals. In 1812, however, he wrote a passionate love-letter to an 'Eternally Beloved' (probably Antonie Brentano, a Viennese married to a Frankfurt businessman), but probably the letter was never sent.

With his powerful and expansive middle-period works, which include the Pastoral Symphony (no.6, conjuring up his feelings about the countryside, which he loved), Symphony no.7 and Symphony no. 8, Piano Concertos nos.4 (a lyrical work) and 5 (the noble and brilliant Emperor) and the Violin Concerto, as well as more chamber works and piano sonatas (such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata) Beethoven was firmly established as the greatest composer of his time. His piano-playing career had finished in 1808 (a charity appearance in 1814 was a disaster because of his deafness). That year he had considered leaving Vienna for a secure post in Germany, but three Viennese noblemen had banded together to provide him with a steady income and he remained there, although the plan foundered in the ensuing Napoleonic wars in which his patrons suffered and the value of Austrian money declined.

The years after 1812 were relatively unproductive. He seems to have been seriously depressed, by his deafness and the resulting isolation, by the failure of his marital hopes and (from 1815) by anxieties over the custodianship of the son of his late brother, which involved him in legal actions. But he came out of these trials to write his profoundest music, which surely reflects something of what he had been through. There are seven piano sonatas in this, his 'late period', including the turbulent Hammerklavier op.106, with its dynamic writing and its harsh, rebarbative fugue, and op.110, which also has fugues and much eccentric writing at the instrument's extremes of compass; there is a great Mass and a Choral Symphony, no.9 in d Minor, where the extended variation-finale is a setting for soloists and chorus of Schiller's Ode to Joy; and there is a group of string quartets, music on a new plane of spiritual depth, with their exalted ideas, abrupt contrasts and emotional intensity. The traditional four-movement scheme and conventional forms are discarded in favour of designs of six or seven movements, some fugal, some akin to variations (these forms especially attracted him in his late years), some song-like, some martial, one even like a chorale prelude. For Beethoven, the act of composition had always been a struggle, as the tortuous scrawls of his sketchbooks show; in these late works the sense of agonizing effort is a part of the music.

Musical taste in Vienna had changed during the first decades of the 19th century; the public were chiefly interested in light Italian opera (especially Rossini) and easygoing chamber music and songs, to suit the prevalent bourgeois taste. Yet the Viennese were conscious of Beethoven's greatness: they applauded the Choral Symphony even though, understandably, they found it difficuit, and though baffled by the late quartets they sensed their extraordinary visionary qualities. His reputation went far beyond Vienna: the late Mass was first heard in St. Petersburg, and the initial commission that produced the Choral Symphony had come from the Philharmonic Society of London. When, early in 1827, he died, 10,000 are said to have attended the funeral. He had become a public figure, as no composer had done before. Unlike composers of the preceding generation, he had never been a purveyor of music to the nobility he had lived into the age - indeed helped create it - of the artist as hero and the property of mankind at large.