Божидара Кузманова

Plovdiv-born in 1977 and schooled at the Lyubomir Pipkov school in Sofia, Bojidara Kouzmanova took her Vienna degree with distinction from Günter Pichler's class and has worked from that city since. The prizes came early — the Béla Bartók and Dobrin Petkov competitions in 1996, the Haverhill Sinfonia and Hudson Valley competitions in 2000, the Alois Kottmann Award in 2001 — and her first commercial record, the Bruch and Mendelssohn concertos with the Plovdiv Philharmonic, was made in February 1996. Contemporary music is part of her playing: a member of ensemble xx. jahrhundert since 2004 and of the Kreisler Trio Wien since 2007, she also appears with the Ensemble Wiener Collage, and several European composers have written pieces that she then introduced. Her Korngold concerto brought a second, editorial obligation with it — she prepared the published score and wrote its performance notes. The Brahms Horn Trio and violin sonatas she recorded won the Ö1 Pasticcio Prize in 2016. She has taught the violin at the Bach Music School in Vienna. Her partnership with the conductor Nayden Todorov dates from 1995 and has produced recordings of Bruch, Korngold, Prokofiev, Bach and the Brahms Double Concerto. Kouzmanova appeared as a violin soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 1998, 2000 and 2001. The University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna gave her its honorary prize in 2005. Among the works written for her are Peter Richter's Bojidara violin concerto, Thomas Wally's und ein einziger Ton weinte in einem Frühling and solo pieces by Perikles Liakakis, Julia Purgina, Manuela Kerer and Roumen Dimitrov; with Purgina as violist she recorded En Suite, which sets new pieces beside Bach arrangements. She has played with the Prague Radio Symphony, the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmonic, the Montevideo Symphony and the Recreation Orchestra in Graz, and the instruments she uses, Stradivari and Guarneri among them, come to her from private sponsors.