Liya Petrova

Liya Petrova studied with Petru Munteanu in Rostock, Augustin Dumay at the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth, Antje Weithaas in Berlin and Renaud Capuçon in Lausanne. Bulgarian by birth, she won the Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition in Odense in 2016 and has since built a career from Paris across the orchestras of Europe and East Asia. She has recorded for the French label Mirare since 2020; the two-album project Momentum, released in 2025, was made an Editor's Choice by Gramophone. She performs on the 1733 Consolo Guarneri del Gesù, provided by Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture, and on an Antonio Stradivari entrusted to her by a private sponsor. The Sofia Philharmonic biography dates the Stradivari to 1727, while her own biography gives 1721. Festival work has become a second strand: she founded a chamber-music festival in Paris in 2020 and co-founded the Rencontres Musicales de Nîmes in 2022. Born in Sofia in 1990 into a family of musicians, she made her debut at six at Bulgaria Hall with the Sofia Soloists under Plamen Djourov, received the Mozart Medal and a UNESCO title two years later, studied with Evelina Arabadjieva at the Pipkov school, and entered Rostock at eleven. Bulgarian National Radio listeners voted her young musician of the year in 2007. Her first album, Nielsen and Prokofiev with the Odense Philharmonic under Kristiina Poska, was followed by Momentum 1 in 2023 and Momentum 2 in 2025 with the Royal Philharmonic under Duncan Ward, and by a Proms debut in July 2025.