DOBRINKA TABAKOVA (b. 1980) has successfully established herself on the world stage with performances of her compositions in Bulgaria, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, USA, China, Australia, etc. and with the participation of musicians such as Gidon Kremer, Kristina Blaumane, Natalie Klein, Miloš Karadaglić, Maxim Rysanov, Janine Jansen, etc.

Born in Bulgaria in 1980, Tabakova moved to London at the age of 11 and began studies in piano and composition. She graduated the Royal Academy of Music and Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she won the Witold Lutosławski Prize (1999). She subsequently receiving a PhD in composition from King’s College London, where she was awarded the Adam Prize (2007). She participated in the master classes of the Paris, Milan, Prague and Norwegian Conservatories, and was accepted into the classes of some of the most distinguished composers of the 20th century – Xenakis, Solbiati, John Adams, Louis Andriessen.

Dobrinka Tabakova’s works have been distinguished with numerous prestigious awards and appear in the catalogues of well-known record companies such as Hyperion and Avie. At the age of 14, Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud prize and medal in Vienna for a violin-and-piano piece called Prayer, from which point she plots the start of a real composition trajectory. Another achievement came in 2002, when her choral composition Praise won the Barclays Private Banking Prize for an anthem for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations, and was performed at St. Paul’s Cathedral. In 2011 she was awarded first prize and the Sorel Medallion in Choral Composition, New York. In 2008 she was selected to participate in the World Sun Songs Choir Festival in Riga, Latvia with a composition based on a text by Blaga Dimitrova. Her works have been included in the Mozart Weeks in Salzburg and in the Winter Concerts at the Musikverein Vienna.

In 2013 her first CD “String Paths” was released by the ECM company. The CD entered the top 3 of the British Classical Music Charts and was highly praised by specialist critics in BBC Music Magazine, Stereo Magazine, International Music Reviews: Tabakova writes for her chosen instruments with disarming naturalness and enthusiasm…Contemporary music, in short, that’s amazingly easy on the ear. (BBC Music Magazine, August 2013). In December of that year, the disc was nominated for a Grammy for Best Classical Music Collected Album. Her cantata Immortal Shakespeare (2016) opened the 400^th  anniversary celebrations of the poet’s death in the cathedral where he was buried. The performance was recorded and broadcast on the BBC.

Dobrinka Tabakova has received numerous prestigious commissions, including from the Royal Philharmonic Society for the 2014 UK Music Biennial. She has been invited as Composer-in-Residence by the Oxford Chamber Music Festival, Leicester International Chamber Music Festival, Utrecht International Chamber Music Festival and the Kremerata Baltica Festival in Sigulda (Latvia). She has been guest composer at the Lokenhaus Festival (Austria), the Julian Rachlin and Friends Festival in Dubrovnik and Musikrama in Hong Kong.

After Leipzig in the MDR RSO, Dobrinka Tabakova was the BBC Concert Orchestra’s Composer in Residence for five years starting in 2017/18. She wrote larger-scale orchestral works, such as her expanded Earth Suite project (2018-2020), a triptych of orchestral pieces performed both individually and as a cycle. A third piece, Timber and Steel, was premiered at the 2019 BBC Proms to mark the 150^th  anniversary of Sir Henry Wood’s birth.

She is currently in residence at the Hallé for the 2022/23 season. Her collaborations with the Hallé Youth Orchestra include a commission for the ensemble and a focus on her chamber music, with performances including Fantasy Homage to Schubert (2013) and Moreny (2007). In October, a label release with the orchestra will be realized, which includes the Earth Suite and Orpheus’ Comet (2017), as well as a Cello Concerto with Guy Johnston (the concerto was written and performed in 2008 on commission for the Cello Biennale Festival in Amsterdam by the Kremerata Baltica and the Amsterdam Symphony, soloist Kristina Blaumane) and the Viola Concerto with Maxim Rysanov (2004, a product of her artistic contacts with the great violist and conductor). For Dobrinka Tabakova, It (writing) can be lonely. Tabakova’s admission of this feeling of isolation explains her dedication to collaboration, with individuals, choirs and orchestras. Understanding the voice of an ensemble or soloist is an important part of the writing and commissioning process... Working with young people in the Hallé especially has been an experience that gets to the heart of Tabakova’s compositional process – to get inside an ensemble, understand its voice and write music that challenges it, not only technically but also musically and emotionally ... And it’s sending out questions to a bigger universe and sharing them in this wonderful abstract world of sounds that vibrates.(as Hattie Butterworth would put it in her interview with Dobrinka Tabakova for Gramophone Magazine, July 2023).

Dobrinka Tabakova is the author of chamber music for various ensembles, for string orchestra, for soloist and symphony orchestra, choral, stage music, multimedia, arrangements. Her third original album (ECM Records) with premiere performances by the St. Louis Chamber Choir and “The Sixteen”, a new string quartet for the ARD Competition in Munich, and a new recording with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in New York are expected in October 2023.