Plamen Beykov

Two decades of work in the Bulgarian houses lie behind Plamen Beykov's repertoire, which began with Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia — the production State Opera Plovdiv took through the Netherlands and Germany — and went on to Verdi's Nabucco and La traviata and to Shostakovich's Katerina Izmailova. He has sung the vocal-symphonic repertoire as well, including Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man, with State Opera Rousse and the Sofia Philharmonic. A bass, he is a soloist of the State Opera Rousse and has taken part in each of Gian Gianotti's Bulgarian stagings: L'italiana in Algeri at the Sofia Opera, and Don Pasquale, Le nozze di Figaro and Guillaume Tell in Rousse. In the last of these he sang Tell's Austrian adversary. He studied opera singing in London with the bass-baritone Steven Roberts and with Graziella Sciutti at the Royal College of Music, then deepened that work at the Accademia di Arte e Cultura in Rome with Boris Christoff. In 1997 he was made a member of the Royal College of Music. He has been dramaturge of the State Opera Rousse since July 2018 and its director and artistic director since March 2022, after fifteen seasons in the company as a soloist. In 2020 he took a master's degree in musical and stage direction at the National Academy of Music with Violeta Gorcheva, and he has staged productions for the houses in Rousse and Stara Zagora. His 2022 production of Carl Wolrath's The Knight's Journey, made with the Rousse children's opera and the orchestra of the State Opera Rousse, received the Crystal Lyre award.