Mariana Panova

Across more than a decade Mariana Panova has sung in opera and in concert, from Gounod's Faust at the Sofia Opera to Bizet's Carmen, master-class galas and touring projects abroad; the Sofia programmes of 2008 placed her alongside Arsen Soghomonyan and Raina Kabaivanska. She took her degree at the National Academy of Music in Sofia, studying with Yulia Wiener and Mihail Angelov and later with Mario Bigazzi in Monte Carlo, and worked in master classes with Alexandrina Milcheva, Luca Canonici, Nikola Nikolov, Diana Soviero and Joan Dornemann of the Metropolitan Opera. Her early engagements included Olga in Fedora at Palm Beach Opera and Mimì in its outreach programme, and she has sung Tosca in Reto Nickler's Dutch staging in The Hague, Rotterdam, Eindhoven and Ghent. As a soloist of the Plovdiv Opera her roles have included Nedda, Musetta, Micaela, Antonia, Rosalinde, Leonora and Katerina Izmailova, and she sings in Beethoven's Ninth and the requiems of Mozart and Dvorak.