Maria Tsvetkova-Madzharova

North American tours of Aida and Le nozze di Figaro took Maria Tsvetkova-Madzharova abroad. With the State Opera Burgas she has sung a repertoire running from Mozart and the bel canto composers to Verdi and Puccini; concert and sacred music make up a further strand of her work. Concerts in Burgas, Rousse, Dobrich and Sofia have put her on the same programmes as Kaludi Kaludov, Svetlin Roussev, Paul Badura-Skoda and Vesselina Kasarova. Her company work has included productions conducted by Nayden Todorov. She has also been a soloist of the State Opera Rousse, where her parts have included Marcellina and the Countess in Le nozze di Figaro, Liù in Turandot, Micaëla in Carmen and Marguerite in Faust, the last of these at the March Music Days festival. In the Rousse Guillaume Tell she sang Mathilde. She came to singing from the piano, which she began at ten and played on tour in Italy and France with the Burgas symphony orchestra, and graduated from the State Academy of Music in Sofia in 2000 in the class of Resa Koleva. A prize at the Svetoslav Obretenov national competition in Provadia in 1994 was followed by a place in the Belvedere final in Vienna in 2002, and she sang the Queen of the Night in 2004. She was born in Burgas, and her parts elsewhere have included Katerina Izmailova in Shostakovich's opera, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier and the title role in Parashkev Hadjiev's Maria Desislava, with appearances at the National Opera in Sofia, the Stefan Makedonski music theatre and the companies of Varna, Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. The Katerina Izmailova brought her the Crystal Lyre of the Union of Bulgarian Musicians and Dance Artists in 2015 and a nomination in the Opernwelt critics' poll; listeners of Bulgarian National Radio's Allegro Vivace voted her musician of the year in 2017, and the city of Burgas honoured her in 2018.