Galina Vracheva is among those artists who distinguish two kinds of music: that which is scrupulously acquired and music which is intuitively experienced. She has understood since her early childhood that music can not only be learned, but that music can also be made. All along in her education as a pianist and composer, to “talk in musical language”, i.e. to improvise, came naturally to her.
At the age of five she won a national (Bulgarian) competition for accordeon players – and was perplexed. But it was then and there that to give concerts became natural to her, as an opportunity to show off what she had learned, but even more to let the audience share her pleasure in ‘talking music’. Tamara Jankova, the Bulgarian pianist, wrote in 1962 about the extraordinary talent of Galina, then seven, and about her natural affinity to music.

Galina’s professional education as a pianist began the following year, not without a certain disappointment over having to use the whole hand for accords that could be played by pressing one single button on the accordeon. Plovdiv, Sofia and Moscow were the stations, and in the dogmatically and scientifically rigid surroundings of the Tchaïkovsky Institute Galina learned that respect is an essential part of any performance. She participated in numerous internal competitions and, when winning, was awarded the opportunity to appear in public in Moscow’s concert halls. When her spontaneity, a residual character trait of Galina in her childhood, began to wane, she began to devote a good part of her practice time to improvisations, without being conscious at that time how she would stand to benefit from these efforts later on.

Greatly admiring her most important teachers, Lili Atassanova, Atamas Kurtev and Vera Gornostaeva, Galina absorbed the most important works of the world piano literature, including forty piano concertos and innumerable solo works. Nikolai Jakuschenko, student of Katchaturian, told her to study composition at home, as composers rarely would thrive outside their own folklore. Galina promptly moved to Sofia to study under the Paraschkov Hadjiev, composer of operas. It was to become an unusual experience, as her new teacher was an opponent of the then prevalent constructivism and insisted that his students must completely master the classical musical forms.

One of his mottos is still particularly important to Galina’s own composing: “The audience is uncommitted to and unprepared for the inner musical journey. Only when we give them a tonal orientation can we let our listeners experience all the build-up of tension and have them understand the composition in its time frame – I do not ever want to compose without providing this orientation!”