“Liya Petrova burst onto the international scene in 2016 when she took First Prize at the Carl Nielsen Competition in Denmark, chaired by Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. Two years later, she recorded the Nielsen Concerto and Prokofiev’s Concerto no.1 for Orchid Classics with the Odense Philharmonic and the Estonian conductor Kristiina Poska. This first album earned her international acclaim from the press: The Sunday Times in London admired her ‘gorgeous sound – ripe and silvery, phrasing with majestic breadth’. Pizzicato in Luxembourg also described her sound as ‘silvery and pure’, while Gramophone praised her ‘exceptional tonal variety’ in ‘a marvellous disc’. The Strad was impressed by her ‘natural virtuosity’, and Classical Music found her interpretation of the Nielsen Concerto ‘staggeringly good’ and ‘intensely lyrical’ and compared her Prokofiev to the benchmark version by Vengerov and Rostropovich. In France, ResMusica spoke of ‘a pure tone, a line at once resolute and delicate, sometimes angrier and more provocative, always perfectly controlled by Liya Petrova’.
Liya Petrova has performed as a soloist with such orchestras as the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Staatskapelle Weimar, the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, the Belgian National Orchestra, the Brussels Philharmonic, the KlassikPhilharmonie Hamburg, the Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock and the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra, alongside leading conductors including Philippe Herreweghe, Krzysztof Penderecki, Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider, Yan Tortelier, Xian Zhang, Christopher Warren-Green, Michel Tabachnik and Jesús López Cobos.”
