Recently, the musician was spotted in a medical facility and it became clear that a bad illness had overtaken him. The maestro has gone through all the prescribed chemotherapy and radiotherapy procedures and the worst is now behind him. But he seems to come out of all this hell he’s been through purified and humbled.
“I won’t hide that at the beginning of my music career I was very impatient and pushy. I wanted to be famous and I dreamed of composing music that people around me would like. I think this period lasted about 7 years and ended around 1977 . Then I realized that fame serves the ego of man. And I realized that the hardest fight is the one I have to fight with myself.
To change what I want, and I have somewhat achieved it. For several years now, I often forget that many people know me by face, and when they sometimes stop me, ask me about a concert or a song, I am startled at first. I even often ask myself who I really am and where I come from,” Shterev admitted in his interview.
According to him, the peak moment of a person’s tone is 39 years, because talent also has a limit and a need for energy. It is normal for an artist to create his best works when he is young. When old age comes, at best things settle down to a boring routine and telling the same story in different versions…
The future maestro was born in 1946 in Yambol. After a dramatic afternoon in which his drunken father makes out with his mistress and drives the mother away with the three children, the youngest, the fourth-grader Mitko, ends up in an orphanage, because on the salary of a cleaning lady at the evening high school, the mother cannot afford to feed and clothe her children.
After that, he did not speak to his father for the rest of his life. This is not a film in the style of Italian neorealism, but the beginning of the biography of one of the greatest Bulgarian composers. But the graduate of the Yambol orphanage, “Minko Minkov” is happy when he sees an accordion in one of the rooms. The little one is learning by himself and three years later he is the best in Yambol.
One of the teachers takes him to an exam for the Music School under the hills. The boy wants to become a trumpet player, but the committee decides that he is too physically weak. They accept it bassoon. This happened in the summer of 1960. Again he lived in a boarding house, this time in Plovdiv’s “Rada Kirkovich”. A classmate invites her class to visit. In the luxury apartment, Mitko sees a carpet for the first time. Years from now, a joke dedicated to him will sound like this: “150 cm tall, but when he climbs on his wallet, he becomes two meters”.
In the third year of his studies, the young man fell ill with a bone disease, was hospitalized and was not allowed to continue with the bassoon. Transferring to the “Piano” major.
At the beginning of September in 1967, Mitko played in the most modern establishment in Plovdiv, the beer hall “Kamenitsa”. One evening Emil Dimitrov’s bass guitarist stopped by there. the whites’. At that time, Emil Dimitrov was undoubtedly the biggest pop star in Bulgaria.
The singer appreciates the great talent of the musician and assigns him the arrangements for his first long-playing record. In it, Mitko made his debut as a composer with the songs “Nora” and “Hey, Madeleine”. With the second one, he climbed to the first place in the most prestigious rankings of Radio “Sofia”. Mitko Shterev, however, had to stop his military service and so for two years he led the pop group of DNA – Sliven.
In 1970, he again worked with Emil Dimitrov. At that time, they recorded the album “Dance with Emil”. In this project, Shterev made modern versions of the folk songs “Dilmano, Dilbero” and “Grozde ne nabrah”, which were met with great enthusiasm by the audience. At the beginning of 1971, they visited Paris , where the two are represented by the “Hexagon” publishing house.
Mitko Shterev has over 15 songs written for Emil. He gave hundreds of concerts with him in Bulgaria, Russia and the Czech Republic and was the arranger and music producer of three of his albums, “Gallery” writes.
