Mihail Angelov

Mihail Angelov spent three decades inside the Sofia Opera, from 1961 to 1991, rising from staff conductor through deputy chief and chief conductor to director of the house. He had graduated in conducting from the Bulgarian State Conservatory in 1956 in Vladi Simeonov's class, with postgraduate study in Moscow under Boris Khaikin and Leo Ginzburg. He also directed the opera companies of Rousse, Plovdiv, Burgas and Blagoevgrad, worked at the Stefan Makedonski Music Theatre, and was among the founders of the Sofia Soloists Chamber Orchestra. His opera and ballet repertoire included Bulgarian premières ranging from Rameau and Purcell to Stravinsky. He taught singers, Alexandrina Pendatchanska among them. He died in 2017. Accounts of the repertoire differ: Sofia Opera lists thirty-nine titles, while the Municipality of Ruse lists more than forty; both credit him with seventeen Bulgarian premieres. He began music at twelve and was noticed by the pianist Dimitar Nenov, and after 1956 spent two years as second conductor to Vasil Stefanov at the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra, completing the Moscow postgraduate course ahead of time with full honours. From 2005 he was chief conductor of the Stefan Makedonski Music Theatre, and as a choral conductor he took prizes at Llangollen, Arezzo, Amsterdam and Debrecen, guest-conducting at the Bolshoi, the Berlin State Opera, Trieste, Naples and the houses of Prague, Budapest, Belgrade and Istanbul. Among his singers were Ghena Dimitrova, Stoyan Popov and Boyko Tsvetanov; from his marriage to the singer Maria Dimitrova came the pianist Lyudmil Angelov, and his second wife was Valery Popova.