Founder of the Morski Zvutsi Choir

Prof. Marin Chonev

1932  ·  2012

For fifty-five unbroken years he stood in front of the Morski Zvutsi Choir. In that time he turned a municipal ensemble into a name known on European choral stages, founded the Varna Boys' Choir, started the May choral competition in Varna, and left behind a choral school that now carries his name.

Portrait

The man who made Varna a choral city

Marin Chonev (1932-2012) is bound to the choral art of Varna in a way few people are bound to a single city. A conductor, teacher, organiser and public figure, he worked on three fronts at once: he built ensembles, he built the people who would go on to lead them, and he built the stage on which they could be heard.

The result is rare in Bulgarian culture. Not an isolated success, but an entire infrastructure: a mixed choir, a boys' and youth choir, an international competition, a course for conductors, an international music academy, a university music department, and a network of teachers' choirs across north-eastern Bulgaria. Every one of them outlived its founder.

He did not simply conduct choirs. He built the conditions in which choral singing could exist.

1956 - 2011

The Morski Zvutsi Choir

In 1956 Marin Chonev founded the representative mixed choir Morski Zvutsi ("Sea Sounds") under the Municipality of Varna, and remained its principal conductor without interruption until the end of 2011. Fifty-five years at the head of a single ensemble has few parallels in European choral practice.

The repertoire he built was deliberately wide: Bulgarian and international choral works from the Renaissance to the present day, Eastern Orthodox sacred music, and the great cantata and oratorio literature. Among the titles are Cherubini's Requiem, Rachmaninoff's The Bells, Dvořák's Stabat Mater, Mozart's Don Giovanni and Requiem, and works by Bach, Brahms, Verdi, Alexander Raichev and Mikis Theodorakis.

Under his direction the choir won distinctions at some of the largest choral festivals in Europe, including Middlesbrough, Gorizia, Cork, Cantonigròs and the Varna International Choral Competition.

19 November 1969

The Varna Boys' and Youth Choir

On 19 November 1969 Chonev founded the Varna Boys' Choir, effectively opening the concert life of boys' choirs in Bulgaria outside the capital.

The idea was structurally innovative as well. Instead of losing the boys once their voices broke, the ensemble added a youth section, so that a singer could stay with the choir through the whole arc from child to adult. Today the school keeps around a hundred boys and young men across several formations: preparatory, trainee, and three independent concert ensembles.

With this choir Chonev won the Grand Prize at the song competition in Rostock, Germany, and the highest award, Summa cum laude, at the choral competition in Neerpelt, Belgium. Further distinctions followed from Montreux, Poznań, Delphi, Shumen and Gabrovo, while concert tours took the ensemble through Poland, Germany, Greece, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Luxembourg, Italy and the United States.

The forum

The May Choral Competition

Chonev was the initiator and creator of the Varna choral competition, which began in 1975. From 1982 the forum has carried the name of his own teacher, Prof. Georgi Dimitrov.

Today the International May Choir Competition "Prof. Georgi Dimitrov" is part of the European Grand Prix for Choral Singing, placing it among the most prestigious choral contests in the world. Chonev remained its president until the end of his life.

In 1997 he also launched an International Course for Conductors of Choral and Cantata-Oratorio Music, serving as its director.

1999

The International Music Academy

In 1999 Marin Chonev founded an international music academy together with his son Kalin Chonev. It has been held in Bulgaria and later in other countries, while its headquarters has been in Columbia, South Carolina, USA, from the very beginning.

Kalin Chonev has been the academy's executive director since its founding, running all administrative, financial and organisational work together with his wife Sharon. Marin Chonev was one of its principal lecturers.

The teacher

Academic and educational work

Chonev was a professor of choral conducting at the Academy of Music, Dance and Fine Arts in Plovdiv. In 1985 he became the first head of the newly created Music Department at the Higher Pedagogical Institute in Shumen, today the Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen. In 2000 the university awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa.

A separate and less widely known part of his work was with teachers' choirs. He was the only conductor to lead the teachers' choral ensembles of north-eastern Bulgaria, an initiative that brought together music educators across the region, deepened their training, and put singing back into schools.

Generations of singers and conductors passed through his hands. Much of the choral life of Varna today is led by his former students.

Recognition

Honours

Chronology

The path

Why it matters now

An archive that still sounds

Behind fifty-five years of concert activity lies a vast archive of sound and paper: recordings, programmes, posters, photographs, correspondence. Much of it has never been digitised and remains out of reach for the people who would look for it.

If you hold recordings, photographs or memories from Prof. Chonev's years, please get in touch.