Petya Paneva enters the music school to play drums and drink, but falls in love with folklore

Petya has been studying Bulgarian folklore for years. PHOTO: ASEN VELIKOV

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the whole country

forgotten songs

“I was not the only one to win, the Bulgarian one won. “Thanks to the Voice of Bulgaria, more and more children and young people not only accept Bulgarian music, but also love it,” said Petya Paneva, who won the BTV reality show last week with her performances and beautiful voice. She joined the show and Galena’s team with the desire to show the beauty of our songs and each time she managed to make both the jury and the audience cry.

She is only 21 years old, but she already has solid experience on the folklore scene. She started singing at the age of 3-4, when her parents enrolled her in a children’s vocal group. They perform all kinds of songs in it, but the interest in music was provoked by one of the older girls in the group. She was already a student at the music school with a flute profile. “She was an idol to me and I really wanted to look like her,” Petya Paneva recalled. So she applied to the same school in her hometown of Varna. At that time, children who had an excellent grade in solfeggio were given the opportunity to choose between four profiles – piano, violin, flute and percussion. The future winner received this right and was taken to each of the offices. When she entered the drums, she was very impressed and decided that this would be her choice. You imagined him playing drums and drinking.

It turned out to be a lot

more difficult,

but she is glad that she chose them because her musical culture is very good now. Her parents did not complain that she was a girl, but would play drums. They always gave advice, but they left her and her sister to make their own choices.

The music school had a choir of folk singing, led by Pavlinka Todorova, a colleague of her father from the former ensemble “Varna”. And she kept persuading Petya’s father to send her to sing, but he didn’t want to force her. “The truth is that until I started doing this music, I denied it, even though I grew up with it,” says the winner in The Voice of Bulgaria. Her father, Stanislav Panev, is a choreographer who met her mother Nadezhda in the ensemble, in which they both danced and played the reed. Her great-grandmother sang very well, but her great-grandfather did not allow her to develop as a singer, because then it was not a prestigious field for performance.

On the first day of school in the fourth grade, the headmistress went to Petya’s house and asked her to attend a rehearsal with the other children for just one day to see if she would still like it. Despite the preliminary negative attitude, the girl still agreed and assumed that he liked her. Over time, she began to study folk music more and more in depth and to attend additional lessons. Her sister is also interested in Bulgarian folklore and participates in various projects in this direction. She has singing talent, but she is not attracted to this scene, she has focused on acting, she writes poetry.

Folk music so captivated Petya Paneva that she began to travel around the country in search of songs from different regions. He searches for cassettes and old records, researches wherever he can find information to revive forgotten performances. It often happens that older women look for her themselves in order to give her their songs, which have not been heard anywhere, with a request to be sung by her. Because of the music Petya Paneva moved to Sofia, where she participated in various choirs. She is grateful to Vanya Moneva, the mother of Maria Ilieva,

that he invited her

to be part of

her choir

one of the best in the country and a huge school. After that he moved to “Philip Kutev”, where he sang for two years and is again next to world-renowned names. He left because he decided to move to Plovdiv, where he studied at the Paisii Hilendarski University, majoring in Music and Folk Singing.

Until now, she has always been a self-produced artist. But he added that it is certainly easier for a contractor to have a company behind them. Over the years she has participated in many concerts and festivals, won dozens of awards in various competitions. More with percussion instruments

in the second grade it happens

second to the prestigious

international

festival

She admits that her success could not have happened without the help of her parents, because they spent a lot of time and money to lead her to all these events. It was quite difficult to combine participation with school. But she is glad that her path was full of challenges.

She has repeatedly appeared on stages outside Bulgaria. With the ensemble “Odessos” she has visited Poland, in Greece she has participated in master classes, she has sung in Hungary, Turkey, Italy, etc. The audience outside welcomes Bulgarian music with great enthusiasm, and when he goes abroad in front of our communities, he sees great excitement.

“Fortunately for me, I had the opportunity to touch some of the biggest names in Bulgarian folklore such as Yanka Rupkina, with whom we had several participations and invited me to be part of her anniversary concert on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Kalinka Valcheva and I are very close and I am very happy. One of the valuable pieces of advice he gave me was to go on stage and say to myself: I am the best, I break! Going down, however, to repeat to myself that I can still still and I am not the best. So when I stand in front of an audience, I try to give my best.

We have to be

close to the ground,

not to soar in the clouds, because firstly, there are always better than us, and secondly – you can always be a better version of yourself “, says Petya Paneva.

Now she is happy that with her participation in “The Voice of Bulgaria” she has aroused interest in folk music among young people. Because in her school years she did not meet one. She was in a class of classics and often heard unpleasant comments because her classmates associated this music with the music in pubs and fairs. And today things are different. She recently walked into a store and a woman asked her to wait a while. She returned with a girl no older than 10 who wanted to meet her. A picture of Petya in traditional costume had been placed on the screen of his phone and on his computer at home. There are also many congratulations he continues to receive for his victory in reality. She has not yet been able to read everything that people write to her. But she has received great admiration from many colleagues. “They write to me: What did you do ?! For so many years we have been fighting for folk music to be heard, to be put on an equal footing with all other genres, because it does not yield to them. And you showed up and turned everything upside down in a few months. It helped us make our dreams come true! ”Says Petya.

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