Alexandrina Pendatchanska

Seventeen when she first sang Violetta, Alexandrina Pendatchanska later received prizes at the Dvořák competition, the Bilbao voice competition (second prize in 1988) and UNISA in Pretoria. Her repertoire includes roles running from Poppea and Agrippina to Salome and Chrysothemis, from Semiramide, Ermione and Luisa Miller to Fidelio, Kundry, Carmen. She was born in Sofia in 1970 and trained in piano and voice at the Lyubomir Pipkov National School of Music; her mother, the soprano Valerie Popova, was her principal teacher, and her grandfather was the conductor and violinist Sasha Popov. Her Vitellia, Donna Elvira, Elettra and Arminda in René Jacobs's Mozart cycle for Harmonia Mundi drew a BBC Music Magazine Award, a Gramophone Choice and two Grammy nominations, and her discography extends to Handel's Agrippina, Rossini's Semiramide, Terradellas's Sesostri, Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Rachmaninoff's The Bells. Berlin, La Monnaie, Vienna, Theater an der Wien, Hamburg, Santa Fe, Toronto and Aix-en-Provence have all had her, as did the Bolshoi at its reopening, in Ruslan and Lyudmila. For a stretch of her career she appeared under the name Alex Penda. At nineteen she also made her house debut abroad, as Lucia di Lammermoor in Bilbao in 1989. Elisabetta in Roberto Devereux, Lucrezia Contarini in I due Foscari, Alcina in Orlando Paladino and Rossini's Petite Messe solennelle with the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Riccardo Chailly have been issued on DVD, and her recordings take in Sartorio's Giulio Cesare and Donizetti's Parisina d'Este; in Moscow she sang Salome and the War Requiem with the London Philharmonic under Vladimir Jurowski. Among her conductors have been Myung-Whun Chung, Charles Dutoit and Marc Minkowski, and among her directors Jonathan Miller, Christof Loy, Claus Guth and Dmitri Tcherniakov. She sang Tosca in Sofia in 2017 and made her debut as Santuzza at La Monnaie in 2018.