Emil Tchakarov

At twenty-three Emil Tchakarov emerged a laureate of the Herbert von Karajan competition in Berlin, and the assistantships in Salzburg and Berlin that followed set the course of a career conducted largely abroad. He was chief conductor of the Plovdiv Philharmonic from 1974 to 1978 and of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic in Antwerp from 1983 to 1986, and appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Boston and London symphony orchestras, the Orchestre National de France, the Israel Philharmonic and the Leningrad Philharmonic. In 1986 he founded the Sofia Festival Orchestra, and recorded with it for Sony Classical the cycle of Russian operas — Boris Godunov and Prince Igor among them — with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Stefka Evstatieva and Anna Tomowa-Sintow. The Prince Igor took the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles Cros. Born in Burgas in 1948, he died in Paris in 1991, at forty-three. He came to conducting from the violin, studying at the Sofia Conservatory before the Karajan prize of 1971 opened the way to Berlin and Salzburg. The Sofia Festival Orchestra was assembled for the New Year Music Festival, and the Sony series grew to take in Khovanshchina and Eugene Onegin as well.