Dobrinka Tabakova

Eleven years old when she came from Plovdiv to London, Dobrinka Tabakova was fourteen when she won the Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud prize at the Vienna international competition. She studied at the Royal Academy of Music's junior department, took her degree at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and a doctorate in composition at King's College London. String Paths, her first portrait album, appeared on ECM New Series in 2013 and was nominated for a Grammy the year after; a choral disc recorded at Truro Cathedral for Regent followed. She was composer in residence with the BBC Concert Orchestra from 2017 to 2021, with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra alongside it, and earlier with the Orchestra of the Swan. Commissions have come from Amsterdam Sinfonietta, Spectrum Concerts Berlin, the Manchester International Festival and the BBC. She won the Adam Prize in 2007. Her Suite in the old style for viola and chamber orchestra belongs to String Paths, and she was commissioned to write a cantata for the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death, for the celebrations in his native Stratford-upon-Avon.