SOFIA SOLOISTS

Lyubomir Denev Jr. was born in Sofia in 1988. Since 2010 he has been the chief conductor of the Pioneer Youth Philharmonic, with which he has performed concerts and participated in festivals in Berlin, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Niš, Thessaloniki, Edirne, Sofia, Varna, Plovdiv and others. Under his direction, the orchestra has won numerous national awards, including two Crystal Lyres, the Golden Feather, and Musician of the Year. Until 2024 Denev served as chief conductor of the Shumen State Symphony for two seasons. In 2023 he was invited as a conductor at the Film Scoring Academy of Europe.
Since the beginning of the 2025/2026 season, Lyubomir Denev has taken up the position of conductor of the Sofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra.
In 2014 Denev co-founded the company Four For Music together with Georgi Strezov, Boris Radilov and Georgi Elenkov. He was the principal conductor of the Sofia Session Orchestra and Choir within the company until 2019. During this period Denev conducted hundreds of recording sessions for renowned composers such as Alan Silvestri, Harry and Rupert Gregson-Williams, Thomas Bergersen, Brian Tyler, Georgi Strezov, Mario Grigorov, as well as music for the series The Crown, LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, LEGO Dimensions, and many others.
In 2019 Denev won third prize at the Los Angeles Conductors Competition in USA, and in 2021 he became the first recipient of the Stefan Linev Award for young Bulgarian conductors.
Lyubomir Denev has also appeared as a guest conductor with the Sofia Philharmonic, the Symphony Orchestra and Choir of the Bulgarian National Radio, the BNR Big Band, the Vratsa Symphony, Drop Down Community, the Pazardzhik Symphony Orchestra, the Rousse State Opera House, the Burgas State Opera House, the New Symphony Orchestra, the choirs Schola Cantorum and Mariahilf in Vienna, and many others.
As a composer, Denev is deeply dedicated to the musical theatre genre. He is the author of the musical The Secret of Music and the opera-musical Agartha. Denev also composes concert and film music, as well as numerous orchestrations and arrangements. His original works and orchestrations have been performed by many orchestras worldwide, including the London Musical Theatre Orchestra, Philharmonie Salzburg, the Sofia Philharmonic, the String Orchestra of the University of Miami, the Madison Festival Choir (USA), the BNR Symphony Orchestra, the BNR Big Band, the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, the Sofia Session Orchestra and Choir for FPM Music (UK), and the student orchestra in Suzhou, China.
Denev began playing the piano at the age of five. He graduated from the Lyubomir Pipkov National School of Music in Sofia with a major in piano under Ivan Drenikov. He studied conducting with Prof. Deyan Pavlov, Prof. Plamen Djurov, Prof. Colin Metters, Neil Thomson, Dr. Scott Wiss and Martin Akerwall. He has attended workshops with Michael Tilson Thomas and Freddie Tapner. He completed a master’s degree in orchestral and opera conducting at the National Music Academy in Sofia and earned his doctoral degree in 2017 with the dissertation “Conductorial Problems in the Recording Session of a Symphony Orchestra.” He also studied orchestration with Prof. Alexander Tekeliev.
He has worked with soloists such as Lisa Gerrard, Sarah Davey, Mason Olshavsky, David McCune, Svetlin Roussev, Emanuil Ivanov, Sava Stoyanov, Juan García-Herreros, Kaludi Kaludov and many others.