The Bulgarian Festival Orchestra started their existence in 2004 with a super production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in front of a 4,000-people audience. The musicians in both formations are carefully selected to be from Bulgaria’s finest. The orchestra members are graduates from some of world’s most famous music schools – The Juilliard School, Manhattan School of Music, USC, UCLA, Cologne Hochschule, Moscow, St. Peterburg, Paris, Sofia Conservatories, to name a few. They have many years of orchestral and solo experience; they have played under the batons of world-famous conductors, such as Chung, Celibidache, Böhm, Rozhdestvensky, Temirkanov, Masur, Jansons, and many others.