Viktor Kostov

Viktor Kostov was born in Sofia in 2000 and began piano lessons at about five with Maria Bogdanova. He points to Rachmaninoff as the decisive presence of his childhood listening. He went through the Lyubomir Pipkov National Music School in Sofia, studied with the pianist Yovcho Krushev between 2012 and 2017, and went on to the Pancho Vladigerov National Academy of Music in the class of Professor Borislava Taneva. He won his first competition at ten — the twelfth national competition for young instrumentalists and singers in Provadia — and the following year took first prize and the special Orpheus award in Pernik, which brought him the invitation to open the next edition of that competition with Haydn's Fourth Piano Concerto. He is a laureate of more than fifteen international competitions, has given recitals in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Cyprus, Great Britain, Serbia, North Macedonia and Romania, and has played with leading orchestras in Bulgaria and Romania. He left the Pipkov school in 2019, and at the academy he has studied conducting with Deyan Pavlov alongside the piano. In 2022 he and the tenor Kristiyan Hristov put together a joint project under the name Romantika 22.