Conductor Danail Rachev will be a special musical guest at the Russian Opera Workshop 2011

Heralded by critics as “a musician of real depth, sensitivity and authority,” Danail Rachev is currently in his second season as music director and conductor of the Eugene Symphony, a title that has previously been held by renowned conductors Marin Alsop, Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and Giancarlo Guerrero. Highlights of the 2010-11 season with the Eugene Symphony include performances with world renowned guest artists such as Sarah Chang, Jon Kimura Parker, Alisa Weilerstein and Itzhak Perlman; leading the Eugene Symphony Chorus in an all Beethoven performance featuring the Ninth Symphony; and conducting the Eugene Symphony premiere of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40.

Highlights of the 2009-2010 season with the Eugene Symphony included performances of the five Beethoven piano concerti with soloists Inon Barnatan, Angela Hewitt and Garrick Ohlsson; John Adams’ concerto Dharma at Big Sur with Tracy Silverman on electric violin; and Mozart’s Coronation Mass with the Eugene Symphony Chorus.

The 2009-2010 season also held several important guest conducting debuts for Rachev, including engagements with the London Philharmonic, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. Rachev has also been featured in concerts with CityMusic Cleveland. The 2008-2009 season saw Rachev return to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and make debuts with the the SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony, the Orquestra Nacional do Porto and the Nashville Symphony.

Rachev was Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra from 2005-2008 where he led numerous public concerts and education programs. Of his main series debut the Dallas Morning News wrote: “One of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s best concerts of the past year... start to finish, assistant conductor Danail Rachev got the music unfailingly right, and viscerally compelling.“

In 2002-2003 Rachev was the first ever Conducting Fellow of the New World Symphony where he studied with Michael Tilson Thomas and worked alongside him on many occasions. His debut and subsequent appearances in numerous subscription, family, and chamber music concerts were met with consistent critical acclaim. In his native Bulgaria Rachev has worked with several ensembles including the Russe State Opera, where he led performances of Donizetti’s Don Pasqualeand Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia.

Danail Rachev was born in Shumen, Bulgaria and trained at the State Musical Academy in Sofia, where he received degrees in orchestral and choral conducting. He moved to the United States to study at the Peabody Conservatory on a full scholarship, graduating in 2001. His conducting teachers have included Gustav Meier, Michael Tilson Thomas, Vassil Kazandjiev, David Zinman, and Leonard Slatkin.

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