Biography
Bulgarian-born pianist and film composer Mario Grigorov’s life has always been about music. Grigorov spent most of his life studying a range of musical forms including jazz, classical and world, before composing the score for Lee Daniels’ 2009 film Precious, based on the novel Push by Sapphire (Knopf, 1996). This marks Grigorov’s third collaboration with Daniels; the two also collaborated on Tennessee (2008)and Shadowboxer (2005). Precious, the 2009 New York Film Festival centerpiece and current Lee Daniels sensation, is the story of the ultimate outsider, her struggle to survive and will to overcome. As someone with an acute sense of what it’s like not to belong, Grigorov found that the film resonated with him almost immediately.
A speaker of five languages, he lived in four countries and under three types of government before the age of 18: communist, Islamic and democratic. “I don’t speak a single language without an accent,” says Grigorov.
The son of a concert pianist and trumpeter, Grigorov was born in Sophia, Bulgaria, in 1963. At age five, he became the youngest student ever admitted to the Sophia Conservatory. His life has taken him all over the map, both musically and geographically.
For six years, Grigorov’s family found its home in Tehran, Iran, where his Western classical training continued and meshed with the rich sounds of Persian culture around him. In 1973, Grigorov and his family returned to Bulgaria, where he would study piano under concert pianist Milena Mollova. Soon afterwards, the family moved to East Germany and later to Austria, where Grigorov studied composition and orchestration under the composer Thomas Christian David at the Vienna Conservatorium. He would soon move once again to the New South Wales Conservatorium in Australia where, alongside Don Burrows, Grigorov studied jazz piano and orchestration.
In 1992, Grigorov traveled to the United States under the mentorship of film composer Miles Goodman. Once stateside, while playing keyboard at a music store in Los Angeles, Grigorov was scouted and signed on the spot by Warner Brothers artists & repertoire executive Bob James. The deal led to the release of his first album, Rhymes with Orange (1994) with which he toured in Europe and North America, as well as the highly acclaimed classical crossover hit Aria on Café del Mar (1998), which climbed to number four on Billboard’s Classical Crossover chart. His most recent project Paris to Cuba (2009) draws from his work in film scoring combining elements of diverse world influences. Today, he has done the original scoring for over thirty films and documentaries, along with many successful commercial outlets.
Grigorov has faced cultural, geographical and linguistic challenges his entire life; overcoming these obstacles has instilled in him the ability to transcend genre and tradition in the music he creates. Grigorov continues to push genres and break down the geographical and cultural barriers of music and combine those diverse elements into compelling film scores.
Current film projects of Grigorov’s include tsunami documentary The Third Wave: A Volunteer Story, presented by Sean Penn and executive produced by Morgan Spurlock and Joe Amodei. The film screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival during the Presidential Jury Screening and enjoyed popularity at film festivals in over 20 countries before it’s theatrical release in September 2009. Grigorov worked on Taxi to the Darkside, by Alex Gibney, which went on to win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for 2008.
Grigorov is also the founder of Siblings Music, a New York and Los Angeles based music composition and production company. Started in 2005, the Siblings family is defined by the community of artists that come from a cross section of the entertainment world, carefully selected to collaborate and compose on behalf of the company. Overseen creatively by Grigorov, and managed and produced by his business partner, Evan Eneman, the Siblings Music services span from artist management, creating and production of film scores, advertising, record projects and music licensing and placement.
In addition to playing piano and composing, Grigorov challenges himself with ambidextrous creative outlets such as his simultaneous two-handed symmetrical drawings. He has also developed an experimental type of keyboard play known as Mirror TonesTM©, which is a creative interpretation of the fundamental structure of the piano keyboard. Grigorov hopes to share these forms of expression with students of all creative fields.