Twenty years ago the Silver Bells and their leader Angelina Mileva moved to Varna. That was when music pedagogue Yulia Nedeva started work with the children and invited them to the Varna children’s centre. Here is more from Yulia Nedeva:

“More than 80 children sing in three groups. The youngest are of pre-school age, then come the Junior Silver Bells – children up to the 4^th grade. They won a number of awards at international contests in 2013 and perform independently as well. The oldest are our soloists, laureates of different contests. Three of the children have won scholarships from the Dimitar Berbatov foundation for Bulgarian talents. Ten year old Stefan Trifonov was winner for the month of April 2013 of the children’s radio contest Shturoteka - Frolic-otheque. He has been invited to sing together with the Bulgarian National Radio Big Band. Besides a taste for music we endeavour to instill in the children a sense of the artistic. Three of our former singers now have vocal groups of their own; others have graduated opera singing in Germany and Austria. The music they perform in the Silver Bells has helped many of the children continue working in different musical genres.”

In 2013 the Silver Bells celebrated their jubilee with a concert.

“It was very emotional, former singers from all over Bulgaria and from abroad came for the concert,” Yulia Nedeva goes on to say. “We have guest performers, former Silver Bells singers from Kyustendil. Together with the children from Varna they performed two of the songs at the concert. We have a tradition – and we showed it at this concert with the participation of Silver Bells singers aged 4 to 34.”

The Silver Bells music pedagogue Yulia Nedeva says she is finding it more and more difficult to find new Bulgarian songs for children, so she turns to the melodies from the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s. One of them is Coming Home from the repertoire of Avenue duo. The young singers also perform cover versions of world hits.

The Silver Bells and its soloists have won numerous awards at almost all prestigious national contests; they have two gold medals from the international festivals in Rimini and Lido di Jesolo in Italy, a Grand Prix from the Constellation contest in Vienna, prizes from the festivals in Bydgoszcz, Poland and in Vilnius, Lithuania, from Allegro, Bucharest etc. At the moment they are preparing for the Orpheus in Italy International contest in Rimini, Italy.

The audio file contains recordings of the following works:

-  Tall, blue mountains, music Georgi Spassov, lyrics Mladen Isaev;

-  Our Flag Has Three Colours, music and lyrics Milan Mitev. The recording is from 1978;

-  Rock in the classroom, music Petar Lyondev;

-  Sunny road, music Andrey Drenikov, lyrics Ivan Borislavov;

-  Rio Carnival, music Georgi Krassimirov – Gerassim, lyrics Tatyana Balova;

-  Garden town, music Aram Berberyan.

English version: Milena Daynova