State Opera Plovdiv

Plovdiv's opera company opened in 1953 with Smetana's The Bartered Bride and merged in 1999 with the city's philharmonic, founded in 1945, to form a single institution covering opera, ballet, symphonic and chamber music. Its most distinctive habit is an old one: the company began playing in the open air in the 1960s, and that tradition grew into Opera Open, staged in Plovdiv's Roman theatre, where Aida and Nabucco are performed on the stone tiers against a second-century scaenae frons. Nayden Todorov was music director of the combined opera and philharmonic institution from 2000 to 2005.