Stoika Milanova

Taught by her father, the violinist Trendafil Milanov, from the age of three and then by David Oistrakh at the Moscow Conservatory between 1964 and 1969, Stoika Milanova took second prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 1967 and won the Carl Flesch competition in London three years later. She was born in Plovdiv in 1945, made her Proms debut in 1971, and spent the following decade on the road — Japan, Australia, North America — playing the central Classical and Romantic concertos with the European orchestras and carrying Bulgarian repertoire abroad at a time when few others did. Teaching came to matter as much: she was at the State Conservatory of Venezuela from 2005, and in 2016 took the chair of violin at the National Academy of Music in Sofia. She died in 2024.