Maria Ilieva Prinz

Maria Prinz is the daughter of the Bulgarian conductor and composer Konstantin Iliev, and was born in Sofia. She studied at the Hanns Eisler academy in Berlin between 1975 and 1980, in the class of Rudolf Dunckel, and went on to work with Jörg Demus in Vienna in 1981 and with Yvonne Lefébure in Paris in 1982. She taught at the Zurich academy of music from 1982 to 1987 and has been on the staff of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna since 1987. Her concert life has been built as much on chamber playing as on solo appearances: she performs regularly in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Belgium, Japan and the United States with players of the Vienna Philharmonic — Alfred Prinz, Peter Schmidl, Wolfgang Schulz among them — and her recordings include Haydn and Mozart concertos for Gega New, Brahms's clarinet sonatas with Alfred Prinz for Fontec, and Puccini songs with Krassimira Stoyanova. She gave the first Bulgarian performance of Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques in 2001. From 1999 she has appeared many times as soloist with the Sofia Philharmonic and as a guest of the March Music Days in Rousse; she opened the orchestra's 2006/2007 season in Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 23 under Sir Neville Marriner, and in the Mozart year of 2006 gave recitals of Mozart and his contemporaries in Vienna, Sofia, Prague, Bloomington and Los Angeles. On 17 April 2008 she played Richard Strauss's Burleske with the Sofia Philharmonic under Nayden Todorov, in a programme with Bruckner and Mahler. She has played with the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Muti and with the Sofia Philharmonic under Martin Panteleev, and her halls and festivals include the Musikverein and the Konzerthaus, Carnegie Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo and the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo; her master classes take her to Salzburg, Japan and the United States. She has also worked with flautist Patrick Gallois on concerts and recordings.