Dobrinka Tabakova

Composer Dobrinka Tabakova won her first award for composition when she was just 14. Now, she receives commissions from top musicians and ensembles. Tabakova was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1980. Her parents were both medical physicists. In 1991, she moved to London and enrolled at Alleyn's School in London. She went on to the Junior Department of the Royal Academy of Music, and when she was 14, one of her compositions won the Jean-Frederic Perrenoud Prize of the Fourth International Competition of Music in Vienna. Tabakova won several more prizes as a student at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama (the Lutosławski Composition Prize in 1999) and then King's College, London (the Adam Prize for Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music in 2007), where she earned a PhD. She rounded out her education with summer courses in Paris, Prague, and Milan. Tabakova's principal composition teachers were Simon Bainbridge, Andrew Schultz, and Diana Burrell; she also took master classes with John Adams, Iannis Xenakis, and Louis Andriessen, among others. An early breakthrough came when one of her anthems, Praise, was performed at the Golden Jubilee ceremonies for Queen Elizabeth II in 2002. Her compositions began to appear on recordings on such labels as Avie, BIS, and Hyperion, and in 2013, ECM released an album, String Paths, devoted entirely to her music. Another laurel came her way in 2011 when she won the first prize and medal of the Sorel Organization's choral competition in New York. Tabakova's music is eclectic, drawing variously on minimalism, Renaissance and Baroque styles, and Bulgarian folk music. Among the organizations from which she has received commissions are the Royal Philharmonic Society, BBC Radio 3, and the Three Choirs Festival, and she has worked with various orchestras in Britain and beyond, including the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, the Kammerorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Orchestra of the Swan, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Her works have been performed at festivals around Britain, the U.S., and continental Europe, including Bulgaria and Russia. She has held high-profile residencies at the Utrecht International Chamber Music Festival, the Kremerata Baltica Festival in Latvia, and the Lockenhaus Chamber Music Festival in Austria. Tabakova has continued to garner awards; her Swarm Fanfares for youth orchestra received an Ivor Novello Award nomination at the Ivors Classical Awards. By that time, more than 25 of her compositions -- mostly orchestral works, choral pieces, and chamber music -- had been recorded. ~ James Manheim, Rovi