İlyun Bürkev

Salzburg and Sofia have both heard İlyun Bürkev since 2025. In Salzburg she appeared in Opera and the Ottoman Imagination: Along the Silk Road with Festival Camerata, on a bill with Maria Nazarova, Jiazi Zheng, Mo Wan and Olaia Lamata. In Sofia she played in a Gershwin evening with the Sofia Philharmonic's Fortissimo Academy. Born in 2008, she began the piano at four, studied at the Istanbul State Conservatory and went on to the pre-college programme of the Mozarteum University in Salzburg in the class of Pavel Gililov, with master classes under Alfred Brendel. She is a laureate of the Jeune Chopin and Philadelphia international piano competitions, and at fourteen toured Germany with the Klassische Philharmonie Bonn in Beethoven's Third Concerto, playing at the Konzerthaus in Berlin and the Herkulessaal in Munich. In 2024 she opened the fifty-second Istanbul Music Festival with Grieg's concerto under Cem Mansur, and in 2025 she recorded a first album with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra for Berlin Classics.