Liya Petrova

Liya Petrova is among Eastern Europe's fast-rising violinists from the 2010s and early 2020s decades. She has capitalized on major competition victories, earning appearances across Europe and making several recordings. Petrova was born in 1990 in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. She grew up in a family of musicians and turned into something of a prodigy, winning the Mozart Medal when she was eight years old and being recognized as Best Young Artist of UNESCO. At 11, she traveled to Germany and entered the Young Students program at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock, studying there with Petru Munteanu. She went on for further studies at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Belgium with Augustin Dumay, at the Lausanne Conservatory (the HEMU Lausanne) with Renaud Capuçon, and at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin with Antje Weithaas. In the mid-2010s, Petrova won a series of prizes, most prominently a first prize at the 2016 Carl Nielsen Violin Competition in Denmark. That led to appearances with prominent orchestras as a concerto soloist, many of them in western Europe; these have included the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg, the Brussels Philharmonic, and the Staatskapelle Weimar. Petrova has also toured in Japan regularly. Her chamber music partners are an august list that includes Martha Argerich (at her Martha Argerich and Friends concert series), James Ehnes, and Nicholas Angelich, among many others. Petrova has been frequently seen on festival programs, such as those of the Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the Festival de Radio France in Montpellier, and the Festival of Menton. After releasing her debut album on the Orchid Classics label in 2018 with the Odense Symphony Orchestra (featuring the Prokofiev and Nielsen violin concertos), Petrova moved to the Mirare label in 2020 for a recital album with Boris Kusnezow that included works by Beethoven, Britten, and Barber. She returned the following year on Mirare with an album of concertos by Beethoven and Mozart, recorded with the Sinfonia Varsovia under Jean-Jacques Kantorow.
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