Soprano Sonya Yoncheva is considered one of the leading singers of her generation. With a broad repertoire ranging from baroque operas to Mozart, Verdi and Puccini, she regularly appears at the world's most important opera houses. She is equally in demand as a concert singer. Most recently she celebrated great successes as Violetta (La traviata) in, among others in Berlin, Munich, Paris, London and at the New York Met, as Desdemona (Otello), Mimì (La bohème) and Gilda (Rigoletto) as well as in the title roles of Tosca, Iolanta and Luisa Miller at the Met, as Iolanta, Elisabeth (Don Carlos), Mimì and Lucia di Lammermoor at the Paris Opéra, as Mimì, Norma, Marguerite (Faust) and Antonia (Les Contes d'Hoffmann) at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as Mimì and Imogene (Il pirata) at La Scala in Milan, as Imogene at the Teatro Real in Madrid, as Cherubini's Médée and as Tosca at the Berlin State Opera, as Desdemona at the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden and the Berlin Philharmonie, and as Tatyana (Eugene Onegin) at the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 2022/23 she made her role debut as Fedora in a new production at La Scala in Milan and recently debuted there as Maddalena in Andrea Chénier. She also appeared in a new production of Fedora and as Norma at the Metropolitan Opera and returned to the Berliner Staatsoper as Médée.
Sonya Yoncheva is a graduate of William Christie's academy Le Jardin des Voix. Early music continues to be a focus of her repertoire: she sang Phani / Zima (Les Indes galantes) and Dido (Dido and Aeneas) on tour with Christie, under whose direction she was also acclaimed as Poppea (L'incoronazione di Poppea) at the 2018 Salzburg Festival. In 2017 she undertook a concert tour with a Baroque programme released on Sony Classical.
Born in Bulgaria in 1981, she studied piano and voice in her hometown of Plovdiv and in Geneva. In 2010 she won Domingo's Operalia Competition, where she was also awarded the CulturArte Prize. In 2015 she received the ECHO Klassik as Young Artist of the Year.