After winning the inaugural Siemens Hallé International Conductors Competition in February 2020, Delyana Lazarova has been Assistant Conductor to Sir Mark Elder at the Hallé Orchestra and Music Director of the Hallé Youth Orchestra in Manchester. In the same year she won the James Conlon Conducting Prize at the prestigious Aspen Music Festival, and earlier successes include the NRTA International Conducting Competition in 2019, and the Bruno Walter Conducting Scholarship at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California in 2017 and 2018.

The 2022/23 season holds some exciting debuts for Delyana: in America she will conduct the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra and ROCO Houston. She joins Staatstheater Darmstadt for their New Year’s Concert, works for the first time with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Kammerorchester Basel, the WDR Funkhausorchester, and goes on tour with the Orchestre National de Lille. This season she also returns to the Orchestre National de France and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. With the Hallé Orchestra she opens their season with concerts in Manchester and Dublin and closes their season performing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in Nottingham.

In recent seasons, Delyana Lazarova has worked with orchestras such as the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Real Filharmonía de Galicia, Klangforum Wien, Kammerphilharmonie Graubünden, Musikkollegium Winterthur, Collegium Musicum Basel, London Mozart Players, Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra, Göttinger Symphonieorchester, Orchester des Staatstheaters Meiningen, Estonian Festival Orchestra, and the Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra.

Delyana Lazarova’s international musical education influences her wide-ranging repertoire. Born in Bulgaria, she has a natural affinity to Eastern European and Russian repertoire (Dvořák, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, Bartók), but feels equally at home in the Viennese Classical period, mainly influenced by her studies in Switzerland. Delyana is also passionate about contemporary music; in the 2022/23 season she will conduct a world premiere by William Balcom, as well as works by Caroline Shaw and Dobrinka Tabakova. Last season she premiered Jennifer Walshe’s “Mars” in Amsterdam and Vienna with Klangforum Wien, and other composers featured in her programming in recent seasons include Sofia Gubaidulina, Joan Tower, Jennifer Walshe, Oliver Vibrans and Christopher Theofanidis, Michael Gilbertson and Charles Peck.

Delyana Lazarova is strongly committed to music education and outreach projects, and thoroughly enjoys leading the Hallé Orchestra’s educational concerts. In summer 2022 they performed for nearly 17,000 students in the city and surrounding areas of Manchester.

Delyana studied conducting at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) with Professor Johannes Schlaefli. She attended numerous master classes with Bernard Haitink, Paavo Järvi, Leonard Slatkin, Mark Stringer, Robert Spano and Matthias Pintscher, among others. She also assisted Cristian Măcelaru at the WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln and the Orchestre National de France.

In addition to her master’s degree in conducting, she is an accomplished violinist with a master’s degree and performance diploma from the Jacobs School of Music in Indiana, where she studied under Mauricio Fuks and received a scholarship for artistic excellence.