site.bta"Flesh" Soundtrack Album Tour Precedes Film's Release

The Jivko Petrov Trio is giving a concert at the Sofia Live Club on Monday night as part of a tour to promote its album Beyond the Flesh. The album presents the music from a new Bulgarian feature film, Flesh, directed by Dimitar "Dimi" Stoyanovich, which is to be released shortly.

The film is about the painful experiences of Nadezhda (the Bulgarian for "hope"), who, while translating a novel by a fictitious Nobel laureate, learns that she has a tumour in the head.

The frontman of the trio, pianist and composer Jivko Petrov, told BTA in an interview that he worked on the soundtrack for about a year. "I wrote lots of music, about two hours of total playing time, but the part that remained in the film is about an hour long," he said.

"The movie is hard on the mind but very powerful. It is very difficult to support such a good movie with music," Petrov commented.

"At the beginning, I watched it several times and started to write purely dramatic music to match the story. It didn't work. What came of it was really impossible to watch. I switched to writing more positive music which actually helps the viewer go through the movie easily. I hope I did my job well in this respect," he said.

Much of the music to be performed live during the tour was left out of the soundtrack. "I imagine the music can exist on its own, without the film. We are setting a kind of a precedent, because the music is coming out before the film. I hope it helps people get a taste of what they are going to see," Petrov said.

A soundtrack album is rarely released in Bulgaria as a separate project. "It worked for us, because Dimi gave me a free hand. He just let me know where he wanted to have music, in which part, which scene. The rest was up to me. This resulted in the creation of separate musical pieces supporting the story. These 12 compositions are on the album," the musician explained.

The movie Flesh is a debut both for the director and the soundtrack composer. "The album is like a film meant for listening to, not watching," Petrov said.

The Jivko Petrov Trio, often abbreviated as JP3, consists of Jivko Petrov (piano), Dimitar Semov (drums) and Dimitar Karamfilov (double bass). They recorded the soundtrack together with guitarist Hristo Vichev, who is resident in the United States. "I could not hire a symphony orchestra, so I used samples to fill out the whole picture," Petrov explained.