Соня Йончева

A place in William Christie's Jardin des Voix in 2007 is the least obvious line in her biography and perhaps the most useful one: the baroque discipline learned there still shows in the clean, unforced line she brings to Verdi and Puccini. Yoncheva was born in Plovdiv in 1981, studied piano and voice at the music school in the city, and took her master's degree with Danielle Borst at the Geneva Conservatoire. Winning Operalia in 2010, with the CulturArte prize alongside it, opened the international houses; her Metropolitan debut followed in November 2013 as Gilda, and Mimì, Violetta, Desdemona, Norma and Tosca came after it, there and at La Scala, Covent Garden, the Vienna State Opera and the Paris Opera. In 2025 she took on Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the Metropolitan. She recorded for Sony Classical from 2013 — Paris, mon amour, Handel, The Verdi Album, Rebirth — and in 2023 set up her own label and production company, SY11, together with a recital series at Bulgaria Hall in Sofia. The baroque engagements that came out of the Jardin des Voix took her to Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms, and she recorded Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea on DVD with Max Emanuel Cenčić under Emmanuelle Haïm. Earlier prizes had come in Bulgaria in 2000 and 2001 and at the Aix-en-Provence academy festival in 2007 for her Fiordiligi; her Metropolitan Mimì in November 2014 was another late replacement, five weeks after the birth of her son, and she opened the house's 2015-16 season as Desdemona.