State Opera Plovdiv Choir

The chorus of State Opera Plovdiv was founded in 1953 by Angel Hristov, who became its long-serving leader. Subsequent conductors have included Atanas Dimitrov, Miroslav Popsavov, Krastin Nastev, Zdravko Lazarov and Vesela Geleva. Its repertoire extends from staged opera to oratorio and unaccompanied choral music, encompassing composers from Monteverdi and Gluck to Rodion Shchedrin and Lazar Nikolov. The ensemble performs both in the theatre and on concert platforms. Tours have taken it to Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and South Korea, alongside collaborations elsewhere in the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Choral singing in Plovdiv answers to an extraordinary room. The opera company of Bulgaria's second city performs through the summer in the Roman theatre of Philippopolis, a second-century auditorium cut into the hillside and recovered by excavation only in the 1970s, where a chorus must carry in the open air with no roof to help it. The ensemble's core is the Italian repertoire, and the company has marked Verdi with festival galas of its own.