Liya Petrova

She is praised for her “effortless virtuosity” (“The Strad”), “exceptional tonal variety” (“Gramophone”) and “gorgeous sound – ripe and silvery; phrasing with majestic breadth” (“The Sunday Times”). She was revealed to the international scene in 2016 when she won the First Prize at the Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition in Denmark. As a soloist, Liya Petrova is the guest of world-renowned orchestras, such as the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre National de Lyon, the Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra. She has performed with leading conductors, such as Stanislas Kochanovsky, Elim Chan, Duncan Ward, Krzysztof Penderecki, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, Diego Fasolis and Jean-Jacques Kantorow. She is a regular guest of many music festivals like the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Festspiele, the Rheingau Musik Festival, the Festival Radio France Montpellier, the Festival de La Roque-d’Anthéron, the Festival de Musique de Menton, the Festival de La Grange de Meslay, Aix-en-Provence Easter Festival and the Rencontres Musicales d’Evian. She plays regularly with pianists such as Alexandre Kantorow, Beatrice Rana, Éric Le Sage and Adam Laloum, as well as with cellists including Pablo Ferrandez, Aurélien Pascal or Bruno Philippe. She has also collaborated with Martha Argerich, Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Lise Berthaud, Daishin Kashimoto, Yuri Bashmet, Mischa Maisky, Ivry Gitlis, Augustin Dumay, Renaud Capuçon and Nicholas Angelich. In the spring of 2020, during the first lockdown, she created the chamber music festival La Musikfest Parisienne at the Salle Cortot in Paris. Its first edition, held exclusively online, was a tremendous success. For its third edition, in May 2022, the festival hosted a pleiad of outstanding musicians: Alexandre Kantorow, Beatrice Rana, Emmanuel Pahud, Éric Le Sage, Daishin Kashimoto and Paul Meyer. In the same year, together with two friends, Alexandre Kantorow and Aurélien Pascal, Liya Petrova created the festival Les Rencontres Musicales de Nîmes, in which the trio holds the artistic directorship. At the beginning of 2020, the artist recorded her first album on the Mirare label with music by Beethoven, Barber and Britten in collaboration with pianist Boris Kusnezow. A year later, another album with Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Mozart’s Concerto No. 7, recorded with the Sinfonia Varsovia orchestra under the direction of Jean-Jacques Kantorow, received unanimous critical acclaim. Born in Bulgaria to a family of musicians, Liya Petrova developed her skills with Augustin Dumay at La Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth, Antje Weithaas at the Hans Eisler Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and Renaud Capuçon at the Haute École de Musique in Lausanne. She plays a magnificent Helios violin made in 1735 in Cremona by Stradivarius’s disciple Carlo Bergonzi, on loan courtesy of Xavier and Joséphine Moreno.