Ludmila Gerova

In 1999 the Bulgarian soprano Ludmila Gerova went into the studio with the Sofia Festival Orchestra to record operatic arias by Mozart, Puccini and Weber for Music Minus One, the American label whose discs let a singer rehearse at home with an orchestra behind her. Gerova appeared as a soprano soloist at the Thracia Summer Music Festival in Plovdiv in 1997 and 1998. Gerova came to music through the Bodra Smyana children's choir, where Boncho Bochev, Ivelin Dimitrov and Vassil Kazandjiev taught her, and she studied violin with Hristo Petkov. She was among the founders of the Polyphonia chamber capella, its soloist and chorus master from 1968 to 1989 and became its director in 2008; her solo career began in the 1980s. As a student she conducted the Bulgarian Radio folk choir and won a prize with it in Bratislava in 1988, and as producer of vocal music at Bulgarian National Radio she brought more than two hundred young performers and conductors to the microphone. Her voice teachers included Elisabeth Rutgers, Ekaterina Apostolova and Stoyan Kissyov.