Biography
Christina Vasileva was born in Sofia into a Czech-Bulgarian family. After graduating from the Lyubomir Pipkov Conservatoire in 1990, she studied bel canto under Michael Tomaschov. She launched her international career in 1995 by winning the Antonín Dvořák International Competition in Karlovy Vary. In the same year she was engaged by the F. X. Šalda Theatre in Liberec. From 2006 to 2011 she was a soloist of the State Opera Prague, where she created Verdi‘s Elena (I vespri siciliani) and Desdemona (Otello), Puccini‘s Cio-Cio-San (Madama Butterfly), Manon Lescaut,Tosca, Liù (Turandot) and Mimi (La bohème), for which she was nominated for a Thalia Award 2008, and then also Dvořák‘s Rusalka and the title role of the opera Hélène by Camille Saint-Saëns in a concert performance. She has also guest appeared at other Czech opera houses in Brno, Plzeň, Ústí nad Labem and at the National Theatre in Prague, where she has created Cio-Cio-San, Rusalka, Mozart’s Hyacinthus (Apollo et Hyacinthus) and Donna Elvira (Don Giovanni) and Janáček’s Katya Kabanova, for which she received the Thalia Award 2010. Christina Vasileva has also appeared as a guest in opera houses in Europe and overseas, with her most noteworthy roles of Rusalka at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Cio-Cio-San at the Eutiner Festspiele, Norma at the Teatro Puccini in Rhodes and Desdemona at the Theater Winterthur. She dazzled as Violetta (Verdi: La traviata) at the Oji Hall in Tokyo (2003) and Puccini’s Liù during the State Opera Prague’s tour in Salzburg in 2008. Since 2011 Christina Vasileva has worked freelance and has been a permanent quest singer at the Theater Freiburg, where she has created Verdi’s Desdemona and Elena, Puccini‘s Manon Lescaut and Giorgetta (Il tabarro), Elsa (Wagner: Lohengrin) or Elisa (Tchaikovsky: The Queen of Spades). For her creation of Desdemona she was nominated for “Singer of the Year” by Opernwelt magazine, and she also excelled in the title role of Riccardo Zandonai‘s Francesca da Rimini in July 2013; the concert performance was radio broadcast by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and there will be also a CD recording.
Photo: Ilona Sochorová
Update: September 2015