Kamelia Kader

Nineteen at her Sofia Opera debut, as Marcellina in Le nozze di Figaro, Kamelia Kader read music at New Bulgarian University and then went to the Accademia d'Arte Lirica in Osimo, where her teachers included Sergio Segalini, William Matteuzzi and Raina Kabaivanska; she took master classes with Montserrat Caballé, Magda Olivero, Gustav Kuhn and Renato Bruson, and won competitions in Italy and Bulgaria in chamber and contemporary repertoire. Her mezzo roles include Mrs Sedley in Peter Grimes in Bologna and at La Fenice, Quickly in Falstaff at Montpellier and Nice, La Cieca in La Gioconda at Catania, Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream in Genoa and in Oman. Against those stand Azucena at Saint-Étienne and Waltraute in Götterdämmerung in Sofia, and roles in rarities — Romeo in Vaccai's Giulietta e Romeo, Rodrigo in Donizetti's Pia de' Tolomei. Her roles run from the baroque through Mozart, Rossini, Verdi and Puccini to Britten, Wagner and new work, and she has recorded Handel's Alcina with the Bulgarian National Radio orchestra as well as twentieth-century Italian chamber music. Dorabella, Rosina, Mamma Lucia in Cavalleria rusticana and Begbick in Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny belong to the same list.