Владимир Стоянов

Pernik-born, and a chorister for seven years in Zoya Vidas's choir before any conservatoire, Vladimir Stoyanov trained at the Lyubomir Pipkov music school and the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music in Sofia, and in 1994 went on to the Boris Christoff academy in Rome, where Nicola Ghiuselev taught him, and to La Scala's school in Milan, where he worked with Magda Olivero. His stage debut came at the Burgas opera in 1993; three seasons in Plovdiv followed, and from 1999 he has worked as an independent soloist. Sofia first heard him in 1996, in Don Carlos, and Italy in 1998, at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples. Prizes at the Boris Christoff and Pavarotti competitions opened the international houses, and the roles that carried him through them are almost all Verdi's — Rigoletto, Simon Boccanegra, Macbeth, Germont, Renato, Amonasro, Posa, Nabucco — with Scarpia the conspicuous exception. He has sung at the Vienna State Opera, the Metropolitan, La Scala, the Bavarian State Opera, the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Teatro Real, Covent Garden, Zurich and San Francisco, for conductors including Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Antonio Pappano, Daniel Oren, Fabio Luisi and Christian Thielemann, and in stagings by Franco Zeffirelli and Stefan Herheim. Stoyanov appeared as a baritone soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 1999.