Emanuil Ivanov

Emanuil Ivanov won first prize at the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition in Bolzano in 2019, and the engagements that followed took him to Teatro alla Scala, the Herkulessaal in Munich, Wigmore Hall, the Konzerthaus in Dortmund and Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall. He was born in Pazardzhik in 1998, began lessons with Galina Daskalova at seven and studied with Atanas Kurtev from 2013, moving to Britain in 2018 for the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where Pascal Nemirovski and Anthony Hewitt taught him, and afterwards to the Royal Academy of Music and the classes of Joanna MacGregor and Christopher Elton. In 2025 he became the Academy's first Sulamita Aronovsky Piano Fellow. His first album, a programme of Scarlatti sonatas, appeared on Naxos in 2025; among the twentieth-century scores he has taken on is Busoni's own vast Piano Concerto, which he played in Sofia. The Scala recital of February 2021 was given to an empty hall and streamed, with Busoni's fantasia on Bach, Ravel's Miroirs and Scriabin's fifth sonata. He played the Busoni concerto with the Sofia Philharmonic under Emil Tabakov in June 2024 and earlier with the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins, and he has taken on the whole of Shostakovich's twenty-four preludes and fugues. Prizes from the Alessandro Casagrande, Scriabin–Rachmaninov, Liszt–Bartók and Dinu Lipatti competitions stand beside Bulgaria's Crystal Lyre and Young Musician of the Year, and his playing has been broadcast by BBC Radio 3, Rai Radio 3 and NHK.