Soprano Sonya Yoncheva is one of the leading singers of her generation. With an extensive repertory that includes Baroque operas, as well as Mozart, Verdi and Puccini, she is a regular guest at the world’s leading opera houses. She is also much in demand on the concert platform and as a song recitalist.
Over the past few seasons, Sonya Yoncheva has earned a reputation for being the current leading interpreter of Violetta (La traviata), a role she has recently sung in places such as Berlin, Munich, Paris, London and at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. She has also enjoyed great success as Desdemona (Otello), Mimì (La bohème) and Gilda (Rigoletto) as well as in the title roles of Tosca, Iolanta and Luisa Miller at the Met, and as Iolanta, Élisabeth (Don Carlos), Mimì and Lucia di Lammermoor at the Paris Opéra, Mimì, Norma, Marguerite (Faust) and Antonia (Les Contes d’Hoffmann) at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Mimì and Imogene (Il pirata) at La Scala, Milan, Imogene at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Cherubini’s Médée and Tosca at the Berlin State Opera, Desdemona in Baden-Baden and at the Philharmonie in Berlin and Tatyana (Eugene Onegin) at the Deutsche Oper Berlin.
In the 2022/23 season she has made her role debut as the title role of Fedora in a new production at La Scala, Milan; she has also made her role debut there as Maddalena in Andrea Chénier. In addition, she has performed in a new production of Fedora and as Norma at the Metropolitan Opera. Later this season she will sing her first Madama Butterfly at the Vienna State Opera, and return to the Berlin State Opera as Médée.
Significant concert appearances have included the open-air concert ‘Opera for All’ at the Bavarian State Opera, concerts in Sofia, Lyon, Versailles and La Rochelle, Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and her return to the Baden-Baden Festpielhaus for a gala concert and a concert performance as Tosca, a role that she will sing this summer at the Arena di Verona and the Gstaad Festival.
Sonya Yoncheva is a graduate of William Christie’s Le Jardin des Voix. Early music continues to be a focus of her repertory, including Phani and Zima (Les Indes galantes), as well as Dido (Dido and Aeneas) on tour with Christie, with whom she also appeared to great acclaim as Poppea (L’incoronazione di Poppea) at the 2018 Salzburg Festival. In 2017 she toured a Baroque programme that was released by Sony Classical.
Born in Plovdiv in Bulgaria in 1981, she studied the piano and singing with Nelly Koitcheva in her hometown and in Geneva. In 2010 she won Plácido Domingo’s Operalia Competition and was also awarded the CulturArte Prize. In 2015 she received the Echo Klassik Award for young artist of the year.
