VILIANA VALTCHEVA was born in Varna, where in 1999 she graduated from the Dobri Hristov National School of Arts, majoring in piano. She completed her higher education in Switzerland, at the University of Arts in Bern, in the Piano Department, then studied Chamber Music and Piano Accompaniment at the Conservatory in Neuchâtel. Concurrently, she began to study conducting and entered the class of the long-time chief conductor of the Zurich Opera, Prof. Ralf Weikert, at the Lucerne University of Music where she graduated magna cum laude in 2010 and got a Master’s degree in Opera and Symphony Conducting.
Her academic education was followed by master classes with renowned conductors such as Bernard Heitink, David Zinman, Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez. Viliana Valtcheva was a finalist in the renowned Cadaqués Orchestra International Conducting Competition in Spain and was an active conductor in the Berlin Forum “Das Kritische Orchester”, formed by musicians from the most prestigious German orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Munich Philharmonic, Bayerische Rundfunk Orchestra, Dresden Kapelle.
In 2013 she started working at the Lucerne Opera Theatre as a rehearser and assistant to the principal conductor, staying there for three seasons. The same year she was appointed acting conductor in a new production of the Zurich Opera under the principal conductor Fabio Luisi. In 2014 she was invited to Varna as a staff conductor, where she was given the opportunity to develop many new productions – Giordano’s Andre Chenier, Chilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, Bellini’s Norma, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and many others.
From 2008 to 2014 she was a Zeno-Karl Foundation Schindler Fellow (Geneva) for medieval German music and a Richard Wagner-Stiftung-Bayreuth Fellow to study Wagner’s works in Bayreuth and Venice. In January 2018 she made her stage debut at the Teatro Francesco Cilea in Reggio di Calabria (Italy) with Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, and later that year staged Bellini’s opera Norma to great acclaim. Viliana Valtcheva successfully conducted at the Opera in Plovdiv, Biel/Solothurn (Switzerland), she is part of the Knobelsdorff Ensemble with Staatskapelle Berlin. Since 2021 she has also been a full-time conductor at the Ruse State Opera, and in January 2022 she made her debut with the Sofia Philharmonic. In July 2022, at the invitation of the renowned Argentine tenor and conductor José Cura, she took part in the first edition of the Pelješac Festival in the town of Orebic (Croatia).
In the 2023/2024 season, Viliana Valtcheva conducted the Bulgarian premiere of The Addams Family musical at the Opera Open Festival in Plovdiv, she also participated in the Symfonia Umenia summer festival in Bratislava, together with the ensemble of the Berlin Staatskapelle. In 2023 and 2024 Sofia Philharmonic extended another invitation for a concert on September 17th, with the world famous violinist Midori, with whom they performed works by Bernstein, Palmieri and Dobrinka Tabakova, Tchaikovsky and Schumann. In May 2024 she juried the prestigious Dimitrios Mitropoulus Conducting Competition in Thessaloniki.