State Opera Stara Zagora Choir

The chorus of State Opera Stara Zagora took part in the company’s inaugural production of Georgi Atanasov’s Gergana on 1 July 1925. Prepared by Zlatan Stanchev, that first chorus comprised eighteen women and twenty-two men. Its formation grew from the town’s choral societies and the work of musicians associated with the Kaval Musical Society. Across later decades the ensemble developed repertoire in opera and operetta, working with chorus masters including Iliya Iliev, Bogdana Popova, Emil Minev and Mladen Stanev. Productions of Puccini, Mozart, Verdi, Offenbach and Donizetti form part of its documented performance history. Whenever the Stara Zagora company travels, its chorus travels with it. Trained on the Italian and German repertoire that fills the house at home, the singers have been heard across Germany — at Monschau among other places — in staged Mozart, including Die Zauberflöte, and in the gala programmes by which opera reaches towns that have no opera house of their own.