Plamena Mangova

Second prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2007 opened the international career of Plamena Mangova, who had already taken third at the Paloma O'Shea competition at eighteen and made her Paris debut at the Théâtre du Châtelet in 2000. Born in Pleven in 1980, she studied with Marina Kapatsinskaya at the National Academy of Music in Sofia, then with Dmitri Bashkirov at the Reina Sofía school in Madrid and with Abdel Rahman El Bacha at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel. Her recordings begin with a Shostakovich recital that took a Diapason d'Or and continue through the same composer's Piano Quintet and the complete Prokofiev works for violin and piano; her Appassionata reached an unusually wide audience when it was used in the third season of Fargo. Richard Strauss's Burleske followed in 2008 and Brahms's First Piano Concerto in 2010, both with the Belgian National Orchestra under Walter Weller, and Beethoven too has gone on disc. A chamber recording of Shostakovich made with Tatiana Melnychenko, Natalia Prischepenko and Sebastian Klinger took a prize from Pizzicato, and Franck and Ysaÿe came out with the cellist Alexander Kniazev.