Several years ago jazz singer Lilly Ilieva chose to return to Bulgaria instead of continuing her music career in Groningen, the Netherlands, where she studied. The renowned Bulgarian pianist, composer and conductor of the Bulgarian National Radio Big Band Antoni Donchev was one of the first musicians who invited  Lilly Ilieva to sing on Bulgarian stage.  Lilly had a series of participations with the BNR Big Band. Lilly Ilieva and Antoni Donchev will hold a joint concert on March 30 in Studio 1 of the Bulgarian National Radio. The concert will be recorded into an album named Little Sunflower.

Lilly Ilieva told Radio Bulgaria details about this project:

I have been working together with Antoni Donchev over this project in the past two years. I feel very privileged to perform with a musician of such rank on one stage. There is a special link between us when we are on stage. We feel comfortable when we appear together on the music stage. The concert programme consists of jazz standards, and more specifically jazz ballads. You may ask how we came up with the idea about this project. That is why I will go back in time when we learned the date for one of our joint concerts. Then we discussed what to perform on stage and Antoni said he wanted to play ballads. He left me choose the pieces. Every ballad of this album is of different character. It seemed a bit strange in the beginning, because I thought that the ballads will bore the audience. Later, I accepted Antoni’s idea as a challenge. Antoni and I interpret music in a different manner and we manage to make these ballads sound different each time we perform them. We have the freedom to create and improvise which makes the pieces interesting for the audience. In fact, after the concert held in a Sofia club last year we decided to record the album in a concert, rather than in a studio.

Lilly Ilieva and Antoni Donchev will perform nearly 10 pieces on March 30 in Studio 1 of the Bulgarian National Radio. The two musicians are planning to present their project at festivals and concerts in Bulgaria and abroad in the coming months.

English version: Kostadin Atanasov