Nikolo Kotzev

Fourteen years old and already working as a professional rock guitarist, Nikolo Kotzev had come to the electric guitar by way of the violin, which he started at five. He was born in Pazardzhik on 6 June 1961 into a family of professional musicians, played with Bulgarian bands including Impuls, and moved to Finland in 1989, where the Swedish group Baltimoore gave him his first international profile. In 1994 he founded Brazen Abbot, writing and producing five studio albums for a rotating cast of singers — Glenn Hughes, Joe Lynn Turner, Jørn Lande, Göran Edman, Thomas Vikström, Tony Harnell. The three-act rock opera Nostradamus, released in 2001 with Turner in the title role, sold in numbers unusual for the genre and then waited fifteen years for a staging: the State Opera Rousse gave it on 18 and 19 November 2016, in the 450th year after Nostradamus's death, with the company's orchestra, chorus and ballet, the band Kikimora, and Kotzev himself as musical director. A live recording made at Rousse in May 2017 was issued by Frontiers Records. He returned to Bulgaria in 2011 and formed Kikimora, whose albums have continued to appear. He worked as guitarist and musical director with Robin Gibb, and the opera Joel is another of his stage scores.