Elissaveta Staneva

A 1991 concert programme gives Elissaveta Staneva’s birth as 12 December 1972 in Sofia; the Graz Opera biography gives Plovdiv as her birthplace. Her first appearances came as a soloist at the Stefan Sugarev creative meeting in Kyustendil in 1989 and with a second prize at the twelfth Svetoslav Obretenov national competition in Provadia in 1990. She has given recitals and played as soloist with the Plovdiv Philharmonic and with the Shumen Philharmonic within the Madara Horseman festival, and in 1992 she was admitted to the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra, whose musical director was Claudio Abbado. She went on to study the viola in Vienna in the class of Wolfgang Klos, and her first commercial recording dates from 1992. Staneva appeared as a viola soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 2001. Under the name Staneva-Vogl she trained at the Dobrin Petkov school with Stoika Staneva, at the National Academy of Music with Ognian Stanchev and in Vienna with Wolfgang Klos and Ulrich Schonauer, graduating with honours and a prize of the Austrian Ministry of Science and Culture, and spent ten years with the Gustav Mahler Youth and Mahler Chamber orchestras. Nayden Todorov conducted her first CD, the Johann Christian Bach Viola Concerto with the Plovdiv Youth Orchestra, and the Hoffmeister, Stamitz and Telemann concertos issued by Gega New in 2007. Since 2001 she has led the violas of the Graz Opera orchestra, plays in the Vogl String Trio with Bernhard Vogl and Iva Hölzl-Nikolova, whose Reger trios Gramola released in 2012, and performs on a viola made in Heilbrunn in 1772.