Conductor
Biography
Four master's degrees — orchestral conducting, choral conducting, piano and composition — were what Grigor Palikarov carried out of the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music, where he studied conducting with Vassil Kazandjiev and Ivan Voulpe, composition with Dimitar Tapkoff and piano with Krassimir Taskov. Composition study with Erich Urbanner in Austria and a doctorate completed in 2017 followed. Born in Plovdiv in 1971, he joined the National Opera and Ballet in Sofia in January 2000 and remained on its conducting staff until 2019. Since 2005 he has been managing and artistic director of the Pazardzhik Symphony Orchestra, and in 2024 he became chief conductor of the State Opera in Plovdiv, the house of the city where he was born. Guest engagements have taken him through Europe, Asia and the Americas. He teaches as a professor at the National Academy of Music. Bulgaria's Crystal Lyre has come to him four times — in 2002, 2012, 2017 and 2022 — and the Golden Lyre in 2021, and he holds the special Emil Chakarov prize awarded in 2019. He finished the Plovdiv music school in piano with full distinction and a gold badge in 1990, at twenty-two conducted Rigoletto at the opera theatres of Pleven and Stara Zagora while still a student and made his debut at the National Opera and Ballet in Sofia in 1998, conducting a gala concert of Ghena Dimitrova at her express invitation. His earliest posts were with the symphony orchestra of the Bulgarian Army ensemble from 1995 and as its principal conductor from 1997, alongside the artistic direction of the Pioneer Youth Philharmonic between 1998 and 2003, and he has been a permanent conductor of the Classic FM Orchestra in Sofia since the 2008/09 season. Abroad he has stood before the Royal Belgian Philharmonic, the National Opera and Ballet in Ljubljana, the Century Symphony Orchestra in Taipei, the Krasnoyarsk Opera and Ballet and the Janáček Philharmonic, and in October 2014 he brought the Classic FM Orchestra to the Alte Oper in Frankfurt for the European Cultural Days of the European Central Bank.