by Lionel Rolfe

Special to the G21

Angel Stankov (left)
and Lionel Rolfe

SOFIA, BULGARIA - Angel Stankov, Bulgaria's preeminent violinist and conductor, knows that his country has a terrible reputation. It's partly a reputation earned by benign neglect. People just don't know much about this nation of 7.6 million people.

It's gotten its reputation unfairly, he insists. At the same time he bemoans how little people really do know about Bulgaria. And in a darker, more revelatory mood, he admits that Bulgaria has had powerful and antagonistic neighbors who in the past have said bad things about his country.

He admits that may come from the fact that, historically, Bulgarians were often more effective warriors than diplomats. In any event, after World War I, Macedonia - where most of the people to this day speak Bulgarian and are Bulgarian - was taken away. The country was, quite effectively, thrown off the world stage.

Stankov is convinced that if people did know more about Bulgaria, they would have quite a different opinion about his land. It is not just a nation that produces only Olympic athletes, he says, or has the dubious distinction of having had one of the more repressive of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.

Today the citizens prowling the shopping streets of central Sofia - the capital city with more than a million souls - are, despite poverty and hardship, stylish,if nothing else. Perhaps this sense of style comes from the country's traditional art form of icon making.

Stankov, who has been the soloist as well as concertmaster of the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra when it toured Europe and the United States, ponders the changes. Around the time of the Millennium, he was invited to conduct the complete cycle of Beethoven's nine symphonies when the European Union commemorated the 230th anniversary of the birth of the composer and its own 50th anniversary. He is also known as an important Bartok interpreter. He is very much a European, but he's also a Bulgarian. Stankov's a top pedant and professor of music in the country - and in comparing classical music today and yesterday, when the country was ruled by Communists, he notes a number of things.

Among these is the difficulty of keeping music academies and orchestras together these days when neither music students nor orchestra members can get printed scores. Luckily, the support for music is so intense among Bulgarian society, despite all the changes and poverty, classical music will find a way to survive. The quality of his students more than equals those in other nations, he insists.

One of the most staunchly communist of countries after World War II, Bulgaria's leader from 1946 until his death in 1949 was Georgi Dimitriov. Dimitriov was involved in a failed communist uprising in Bulgaria in 1923 and went into exile afterward. He was a bitter opponent of King Boris. He became a Communist hero when Hitler put him on trial for setting the Reichstag fire. The Nazis had done it themselves, but they wanted to blame a communist for it. Dimitriov, however, defended himself so brilliantly at a court in Leipzig in 1933 the jurors were compelled to acquit him. He won worldwide attention for his bravery - and also the attention of Stalin. In 1935 he became general secretary of the Comintern and directed the armed communist struggle in Bulgaria for Stalin, with whom he became close. He was elected prime minister of Bulgaria in 1946. Dimitriov set into motion one of the most inflexible of communist regimes, yet at its end, Stankov says, its musicians were among the most individualistic and perhaps eccentric of all - putting their own personal stamps on the music they played.

Music needs this, he says. Like many others in classical music, Stankov notes that they just don't make great musicians like they used to. In the old days, there were violinists like Menuhin and Paganini, Heifetz and Oistrakh. Today's young musicians are very good, he says, but they lack the poetry that comes from very personal playing. Of course, he says, the world is becoming homogenized in many things. But the problem is there's no real point to music if it doesn't communicate through one's individual humanity and humanness, he says, no matter how slick the performances. One does that through one's personal stamp on the music, he says.

Bulgarian musicians used to regularly appear not only in nearby Germany and Turkey, with rare forays to the United States, but also throughout most of the former Soviet Union. Today there's not even a single music manager booking Bulgarian musicians abroad, he says. Here Stankov, a distinguished-looking man, with an apparent nobility of character about him, practically hurumphs.

The communists understood the value of culture, he says, and put their money where their mouth was. On the other hand, in today's new society, there's no one to prevent him from making foreign appearances, such as the Communist authorities did to him on the occasion of a debut performance in London when there were concerns about his politics. The problem of the isolated Bulgarian musicians is akin to the isolation that today is devastating its economy in other ways. Stankov says Bulgarians have been incredibly successful in making incredible icons and incredible music, sometimes jazz and classical and even popular, but always based on the rich folk tradition.

The defining moments in Bulgarian history were those centuries spent under the "Turkish yoke" - a reference many Bulgarians still make to their days under the Ottoman empire. Stankov said that Bulgarians did not get a chance to develop such domestic arts as cutlery, ceramics or furniture making. So that helped focus attention on the two things in which Bulgarians were successful. At the heart of the icon making is the nation's fierce attachment to its national Christianity. Even those who are not terribly religious find comfort around the icons in the ancient and byzantine churches across the land. So the religion is very tied up with the unique folk traditions, and it reflects the fact there it has western and eastern influences, with acceptable input from Moslem and Jewish denizens.

At the base of Bulgaria's pop music scene (there is a large but underground punk and heavy metal scene) you will find folk music. The folk tradition is, often incongruously, woven in. Imagine a disco beat to an old folk song! It's especially jarring when the singer is quite accomplished - which rarely happens with disco normally.

Stankov lifts his violin and plays for me some traditional folk tunes, often "very sad," because that is how life has been for Bulgarians throughout history. Western music, such as Beethoven and Mozart, he explains, are much loved in Bulgaria - but it's only been a factor for about a century now. The nation's composers draw from the folk tradition, just as Hungary's Bela Bartok drew from his nation's folk tradition in his music. The state academy where he is a professor and rector is named after one of these composers - the Sofia State Music Academy Pancho Vladigerov.

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Bulgaria has a surprisingly and, again, little-known history with its Jews. Whereas other Balkan neighbors, such as Croatia and Rumania, were brutal in their treatment of Jews - in Rumania local fascists hung Jews on meat hooks and Croatians were among the staunchest and most brutal allies of Hitler - and widely retain those kind of sympathies today. It isn't that you don't see both Nazi and Communist graffiti on the walls in Bulgaria, but anti-semitism never held sway.

The main Jewish synagogue in Sofia is not far from the Turkish mosque at the city's center, which is surrounded by hot mineral water springs piped to the surface. People bring containers and take the stuff home. Stankov makes powerful arguments that Bulgarians, from top Orthodox church officials to parliamentary dealers to the King himself, refused to give Hitler their Jews. The Jews of Macedonia, a land whose people and language are essentially Bulgarian, did not fare so well. Mostly they died in fascist death camps.

Stankov says that King Boris, the father of the present King Simeon, was summoned to Hitler's court about his refusal to turn over his Jews. After he refused a second time, he was flown home - too high and too fast for a man with a heart condition. He died shortly after his return home. Stankov said that it hasn't been proved, but it is widely believed this was an intentional punishment of the monarch by Hitler.

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The fact that Bulgarian musicians are little heard on the world stage like they used to be does not directly affect Stankov. He is well enough known that people contact him to tour. He still tours widely in the former socialist countries, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and occasionally in the United States. He has performed at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center.

Music is not the only area in which Bulgaria has been left in its own morass. Under communism, Bulgaria had a lot of factories and industries - steel, for example. But their market was the former Soviet bloc and with the collapse of communism, they simply collapsed.

Nowadays, Bulgaria still produces a lot of agriculture - you need only eat the peaches and tomatoes to know what those fruits should taste like. But the European Common Market won't allow them in. Thus Bulgaria is denied a market there. You can understand that the world is also unlikely to be friendly to Bulgarian singers.

Today Bulgaria is trying to get into the European Common Market, and one of the prices being demanded is closing down of an old Soviet style nuclear power plant that provides one of the country's few exports. The Common Market talks about the plant's safety, yet they want to replace that plant with another in Rumania which is very much the same kind of facility.

The Bulgarian government officially gave its support to Bush's war against Iraq because, like other former Soviet bloc countries, it wants American largesse - yet almost no one in the country approved of Bush's war.

Stankov says that the official reason the Common Market is going slow about letting Bulgaria in is the fact that the Mafia is completely integrated into the power elite today. "They drive around in BMWs with blacked out windows. Technically blacked out windows are illegal, but the police are afraid to stop them," he says.

I tell him you can see the same thing in Los Angeles, and pray tell how about Italy where the prime minister is widely assumed to be in bed with the mob?

He nods. It's always the same old story with Bulgaria. ннннннн

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LIONEL ROLFE is the author of Literary L.A. and Fat Man on the Left. A new paperback edition of Death And Redemption in London & L.A. has also been released and is available on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. Mr. Rolfe is a working journalist in Los Angeles, a personal friend of our publisher and long-time contributor to The World's Magazine.