Press

On 14 July 2026, Sonya Yoncheva made her Aix-en-Provence Festival debut alongside Leonardo García-Alarcón and Cappella Mediterranea in a programme that spanned centuries and musical traditions. Reviewing the concert, La Marseillaise described the evening as “a truly beautiful moment of music”, Crescendo hailed Sonya as “a singer at the height of her powers”, while Forum Opéra praised “a vocal feast of undeniable beauty” by “one of the greatest voices of our time”.

You can read the reviews here below:
“It all begins with Salome’s aria from Alessandro Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista, reimagined by a singer at the height of her powers and a handful of outstanding musicians from Cappella Mediterranea under the direction of Leonardo García Alarcón.
From there, the journey unfolds through vividly characterized instrumental works by Monteverdi, Caldara, Cavalli, Ribayaz, Murcia, and Díaz, interwoven with vocal pieces from a wide range of traditions: Adelanta’s aria from Cavalli’s Serse, a Monteverdi madrigal, Dido’s final lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, a traditional Bulgarian song, Arnalta’s aria from L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Minerva’s aria from El Prometeo, completed by García Alarcón himself, and a madrigal by Dowland.
Yoncheva’s voice is in magnificent form: radiant top notes, warm, unforced lower register, and a remarkably supple middle voice capable of embracing an astonishing range of colors and emotions. Every number becomes a moment of pure poetry, flowing effortlessly into the next while creating an endlessly captivating succession of contrasting moods. Throughout, she engages in an intimate dialogue with the musicians of Cappella Mediterranea, each emerging in turn as a soloist, bringing joy, melancholy, and reverie to life with inexhaustible vitality.
This is chamber music in the finest sense of the term. Every work reveals unexpected treasures while remaining true to its own expressive world, and the instrumental interludes create striking transitions that lend the evening an almost ritualistic atmosphere. The sense of fulfillment never lets up, sustained by the extraordinary rapport among the performers, who transcend periods and national borders to tell a single, compelling story.
Gradually, as the recital draws to a close, García Alarcón and Yoncheva share the story behind this adventurous project. García Alarcón recalls that Yoncheva was his very first Poppea in Geneva in 2009, just a year after completing the Académie of the Aix-en-Provence Festival. During his student years, he supplemented his income by performing The Four Seasons in arrangements for violin and harpsichord with a young Venezuelan violinist named Domingo Hindoyan, now an internationally acclaimed conductor and Yoncheva’s husband. It was Hindoyan who called García Alarcón one day and said, “Sonya would love to create a program with you, but she doesn’t dare ask.”
The idea took hold immediately. Together they explored music reflecting both their artistic journeys and their personal histories, ultimately weaving it into a dazzling string of musical pearls, as moving as it is irresistible. They perform it with total commitment, joined by a spectacular Cappella Mediterranea, brilliantly anchored by bassist Eric Mathot. Special praise is due to flutist and cornettist Rodrigo Calveyra, gambist Margaux Blanchard, harpist Marina Bonetti, archlutenist Monica Pustilnik, and theorbo player Quito Gato, whose inventive instrumental arrangements are among the evening’s delights. Paired on two guitars, Gato and Pustilnik create moments of irresistible playfulness around Yoncheva’s mesmerizing voice.
The evening closes with the anonymous verses Inútil es decir el brillo, later incorporated by Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco into his celebrated opera La púrpura de la rosa, here transformed by Quito Gato into a thrilling crescendo that showcases every performer on stage. As an encore, Yoncheva once again crosses musical borders, enchanting the audience with an American folk song of haunting beauty. Music, after all, belongs to everyone.
One can only hope that this exceptional program will not remain a one-off, but will enjoy many future performances, perhaps even in Namur, and, who knows, the recording it so richly deserves.”
Serge Martin, Crescendo

“Leaving The Magic Flute in the pit of the Théâtre de l’Archevêché, Leonardo García-Alarcón offered, on Tuesday evening at the Grand Théâtre de Provence, a delightful Baroque concert, illuminated by the presence of the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva. Supported by nine carefully chosen players and a radiant program spanning Italy, England, and Spain, the two artists delivered just over an hour of a musical journey filled with nuance and delicacy.
The two artists recalled how they first met, how their project matured during the anxious hours of the Covid crisis, and how happy they were to reunite for this evening. Their rapport was obvious. The Argentine from La Plata, a harpsichordist, organist, and accomplished musicologist, has now become one of the Festival’s indispensable figures. Besides The Magic Flute this year, he has been behind the Festival’s successful productions at the Jeu de Paume of Cavalli’s Elena and Erismena, and Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, Orfeo, and L’incoronazione di Poppea. Sonya Yoncheva, who made her debut alongside William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, has since become thoroughly established in the great operatic roles, Violetta, Desdemona, Tatyana in Eugene Onegin, and now seems to be following in Callas’s footsteps by taking on Bellini, Donizetti, and Cherubini’s Medea. A rich, warm voice, perfectly suited to such a “musical camerata” program.
The Baroque, at its Venetian roots, was represented by madrigals by Claudio Monteverdi, an excerpt from L’incoronazione di Poppea, and, of course, Francesco Cavalli with Xerse and L’Egisto. Also included was a composition by maestro García-Alarcón based on a melody by the Italian Antonio Draghi. A detour then led to the final flowering of the English Elizabethan madrigal with Orlando Gibbons and John Dowland. Dido’s death, “Remember me!” from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, seemed to suspend the passage of time. The audience listened in reverent silence, even more so when the soprano began a traditional Bulgarian song. The journey then continued through Spain’s Siglo de Oro with a jácara (satirical song) by Lucas Ruiz de Ribayaz and a song by José Marín, Ojos. The Atlantic was then crossed aboard this musical galleon, carrying the audience to the shores of Venezuela with Simón Díaz and to the Peruvian Altiplano with Tomás de Torrejón y Velasco.
A beautiful moment
(…)
A truly beautiful moment of music.”
DMP, La Marseillaise

“Luxury, Calm and Delight
Soprano Sonya Yoncheva’s career blossomed at William Christie’s Jardin des Voix, setting her on a path that might well have remained confined to the Baroque repertoire. But the singer soon chose to broaden her horizons, first towards Bizet and Offenbach, and then Cherubini, Bellini, Verdi, Puccini and Giordano. Baroque music, however, has always retained a privileged place in her career: she released a Handel album in 2017, sang an acclaimed Poppea at the Salzburg Festival in 2018, took part in several Baroque concerts at the Château de Versailles, and will return there next year to sing Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare. Nearly ten years after attending the Festival Academy, her Aix-en-Provence debut alongside Leonardo García Alarcón—who this year conducted the opening production of The Magic Flute—feels as much like a return to her roots as a reunion.
The two artists have, after all, known one another for many years. They met in Geneva in 2008 through the Baroque repertoire, when he was a young teacher and she was still completing her training as a singer; one year later, he conducted her first Poppea. The programme presented at the Grand Théâtre de Provence on 14 July largely revisited that of the album Rebirth, recorded during lockdown and released in 2021, when all shared musical activity had come to a standstill. This journey through seventeenth-century music was geographical as well as musical, travelling from Italy to England and from Spain to Bulgaria. Stradella, Monteverdi, Cavalli and Caldara appeared alongside Gibbons, Purcell and Dowland, before Spanish works by Ribayaz, Marín and Murcia joined the dance.
García Alarcón shaped this succession of musical tableaux with a single, continuous gesture. The pieces often followed one another without interruption, in a highly organic progression, connected by a brief modulation or abruptly contrasted with one another: a lament broken by the impulse of an allegro, a suspended complaint giving way to a dance. The musical substance often seemed to unfold before us. A few notes emerged from the chamber organ, the harp scattered its arpeggios, the texture thickened, and a miniature cosmos gradually began to shimmer.
Much of this was due to the varied colours created by the musicians of Cappella Mediterranea. The instrumental forces changed from one number to the next—two guitars and double bass here, harp and viola da gamba there—and some musicians switched instruments along the way, exchanging a recorder for a cornett or a theorbo for a guitar. One of the guitarists wore an anklet of small bells, which served as percussion in several purely instrumental pieces. Alarcón conducted from the side while playing the keyboards, his right hand on the harpsichord and his left on the chamber organ, guiding instrumentalists and singer alike in a shared musical breath. The programme also included a work of his own, the most “Baroque” piece of the evening in the everyday sense of the word, with its profusion of ornamentation and wide intervals.
The rapport between the musicians and the singer was immediately apparent. The continuo served as both discourse and palette: the musicians broke apart the harmonies, made them glisten, and the voice flowed into this vibrant substance. Within this ever-changing setting, Yoncheva’s voice was strikingly fresh. She made no attempt to disguise the essentially large-scale lyric nature of her instrument. Whereas this repertoire can invite vocal transparency and an absence of vibrato, she retained the richness and fullness of her timbre, making subtle adjustments to her vocal production when required: reducing the vibrato, refining the attacks and varying the support according to the emotion.
From a whisper to full radiance, from shaded half-tones to straight sound, this was a vocal celebration of undeniable sensuous beauty. One could only marvel at the intoxicating, woody colours of the voice. The high point of the evening was Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Far removed from any excess of pathos, Yoncheva assumed a noble tragic bearing in which restraint itself conveyed the full extent of the pain.
The Bulgarian song Zableyalo mi agǎnce provided another memorable moment. Over a persistent drone, the unusual intervals and haunting timbre of the cornett created a hypnotic atmosphere in which the voice entered into dialogue with distant echoes. Elsewhere, subtle changes of lighting and an almost staged use of the space shifted the concert towards the theatrical. During Ribayaz’s Jácara, Yoncheva even joined the musicians with a few dance steps. Murcia and Fernández de Huete’s Tarantela española, meanwhile, sounded almost contemporary: its insistent rhythm and trance-like quality could at times have been mistaken for present-day popular music.
Dowland perhaps best embodied this connection between past and present. In Come again, sweet love doth now invite, Yoncheva almost completely flattened her vibrato and restored the full expressive power of the text with incisive bite. The sharply articulated verbs—“to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die”—the pauses and the inflections all conveyed the disorientation of a woman singing of her sorrow.
The evening ended with an excursion into pop repertoire: ABBA’s “Like an Angel Passing Through My Room.” The choice might have seemed surprising, but proved entirely appropriate. The voice was considerably lightened, the line unfolding in the centre of the range with a naturalness of production reminiscent of musical theatre, while long sustained notes emerged in full lyric voice. The contrast was moving precisely because of its strangeness.
What remained on leaving the theatre was the impression of a delightful journey through time and space, a capsule of musical sensuality. What on disc might have seemed a somewhat disparate anthology found its unity here. The rapport between the performers and the organic succession of the pieces revealed in the concert hall what their mere juxtaposition on the recording had made less immediately apparent.
Above all, the evening allowed us to experience once again the modernity of music several centuries old, music that continues to enchant us, and to rediscover, in an ideal setting, one of the greatest voices of our time.”
Clément Mariage, ForumOpera.com

[Photo credit: Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2026 © Vincent Beaume]

Sonya Yoncheva made her highly anticipated Wigmore Hall debut on 9 July 2026, joined by renowned pianist Malcolm Martineau in her acclaimed recital programme Ad una stella. The evening, bringing together Italian songs by Puccini, Verdi, Martucci and Tosti with some of Puccini’s most beloved operatic heroines, received an enthusiastic response from the British press. Richard Morrison of The Times described the evening as “a thrilling tour through opera’s greatest hits” and praised Sonya for having “uncorked the very best of her voice”, while Mark Pullinger of Canzonetta wrote that she “lived each role” before concluding: “Classy diva. Classy recital.”

“Sonya Yoncheva review — a thrilling tour through opera’s greatest hits”
“The charismatic Bulgarian soprano gathered together classic arias from her favourite roles in her Wigmore Hall debut”
“You could pay a fortune in opera tickets and air fares following Sonya Yoncheva around the world as she delivers her trademark high-intensity interpretations of the doomed heroines of Puccini and Verdi. And doubtless she has fans who do exactly that, and buy the book too (she has published a wonderfully eccentric examination of how 15 of those doomed heroines “mirror” aspects of her own personality).
Alternatively, you could have paid a much more modest sum and seen the charismatic Bulgarian soprano gather all the hit tunes from her favourite operas — well, half a dozen anyway — in her Wigmore Hall debut. OK you wouldn’t have got an orchestra — just Malcolm Martineau’s slightly polite piano accompaniments, though in Bizet’s Habanera he was also required to gamely act the bashful Don José to Yoncheva’s Carmen when she crept round the back of the Steinway and started tickling more than his ivories.
But by that time Yoncheva had brought opera in all its raw passion into the sedate surroundings of the Wigmore. In quick succession she delivered Vissi d’arte from Tosca, Donde lieta uscì from La bohème, Un bel di vedremo from Madama Butterfly and, exquisitely, Adieu notre petite table from Massenet’s Manon, inhabiting each role as though on stage. By then, too, she had put aside the music stand and, as if liberated, uncorked the very best of her voice: the legato wonderfully lush; the top notes full but never forced; a gorgeous, velvety half-voice deployed touchingly in the quiet moments.” (…)
Richard Morrison, The Times

“The Art of the Encore
Always leave ’em wanting more. It’s an old adage, commonly attributed to the legendary promoter Phineas Taylor Barnum, but it’s a good one. After last night’s Wigmore Hall concert which ran to a self-indulgent seven encores (reviewed here for Bachtrack), I was back this evening for the house debut of soprano superstar Sonya Yoncheva, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau. Encore-wise, she offered just the two. Did I feel short-changed? Not a bit.
The recital itself was perfectly proportioned for a singer who spends more of her time treading the world’s great opera stages than recital platforms. A first half composed of songs by Italian composers – Puccini, Verdi and Martucci and a pair of salon gems by Paolo Tosti – followed by a second half featuring four Puccini arias, three of them – from Tosca, Bohème and Butterfly – absolute bangers. Freed from the constraints of a music stand, Yoncheva lived each role, scattering petals from a sunflower during “Se come voi piccina io fossi” from Le villi, blowing a handful at Martineau on the final line, “Non ti scordar di me!” (Forget me not!).
And the encores? Plucking another flower from one of the hall bouquets, she launched into a sultry Carmen habanera, teasing her audience, grabbing Martineau by the shoulder and reclining across his piano stool before directing the line “Mais si je t’aime, si je t’aime, Prends garde à toi !” at her husband, conductor Domingo Hindoyan, sitting in the Stalls.
And then, explaining that any French members of the audience may be keen to watch the World Cup quarter final about to begin, Yoncheva left us with Manon’s “Adieu notre petite table”, noting this was not really adieu, but just au revoir. A smile, a cheery wave to the audience and she was gone. Classy diva. Classy recital.”
Mark Pullinger, Canzonetta