Celebrating its 80th anniversary, Radio Bulgaria welcomes you to monthly voting for music from Bulgaria. Lots will be drawn to select the names of the winners – people who have guessed the winning song or tune. Three of them are going to win CDs with music in the respective genre. There are three entries for each month as the winning tune is the one that attracted the highest number of votes from our listeners from around the world. To vote, please send us an e-mail at english@bnr.bg.

Results will be announced on the 15^th of every month.

The genres that open the chart correspond to the music streams in the upper right hand corner of Radio Bulgaria’s website. The selection of pieces is by the authors of the respective streams. So, we take this opportunity to present to you these colleagues. They answer questions about their earliest memories of music and radio, the ideas, principles and possible compromises that are all part of creating the streams. In the case of classical music, the chart is slightly different from previous ones.

Svetlana Dimitrova is author of classical music programs on the Bulgarian National Radio channel for culture, and also of the classical music streaming maintained by Radio Binar. The show of Il trovatore is a most vivid memory that she keeps – she watched the opera as a little girl in the open-air theater of the Black Sea city of Burgas. She remembers how she was nervously running around aisles, because a very important man was going to take center stage.

„I grew up with opera and even before uttering a word I was listening to opera music exclusively, because my father is an opera singer. As a child I knew opera arias or phrases from them by heart. With my brother and cousins we played a game based on The Barber of Seville and on The Pearl Fishers”.

How did radio get into Svetlana’s life? In a most natural way:

„I got professionally involved with music thanks to radio – it took away nothing, gave me everything instead”, she says and adds that her father’s co-villagers could not believe that he was being paid to sing. After all they all used to sing a lot. The same way, Svetlana is being paid to listen to music and select the cream of it for listeners – what a great job. Behind the scenes though, creating a music program requires hard work and reading everything available about a its topic, so that information is distilled in a most appealing way.

Svetlana is very happy to have feedback from the foreign listeners of Radio Bulgaria who have discovered the classical music streaming channel. For the time being, they cannot read what she writes on classical music regularly, but she has the admiration of a few Spanish-speaking listeners for her superb selection of Bulgarian performers. Currently Svetlana is busy digitalizing a few Bulgarian operas following a request from a young listener in Russia who is in love with the art of opera. She has been inspired by the fact that he has written correctly the name of the first Bulgarian opera Siromakhinya (The Poor Woman).

The word ‘compromise’ is not part of Svetlana’s vocabulary where the streaming channel is concerned. In broadcasts compromise is acceptable provided a certain recording though not of high quality is newsworthy at least.

What about charts? Svetlana is rather skeptical about them. She would be at loss to vote if she has to choose from among Bulgarian opera divas Alexandrona Pendatchanska (Alex Penda), Sonya Yoncheva and Krassimira Stoyanova. „There should be no charts in classical music”, the daughter of opera contends, but still vows to present different renditions of an aria or another work of classical music.

The chart for the most preferred Bulgarian pop song on the wine theme (voting period 15 Feb.-- 15 March) was topped by Nezabrava (Forgetlessess) in the rendition of Katya Filipova. CDs with the latest production of star Vasil Petrov have gone to Horst Kuhn from Germany, Muhammad Dawud Al-Ali from Qatar and Miroslava Ripak from Ukraine.