Associate Principal Cellist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Lachezar Kostov has appeared as a soloist in some of the world's leading concert venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Gewandhaus in Leipzig, and Oji Hall in Tokyo. He was the National Winner at the 2006 MTNA Young Artists Competition and has won numerous prizes including the Cello Award at the Kingsville Competition in 2005, the Grand Prix at the International Music and Earth Competition in Bulgaria, and the concerto competitions at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and Rice University. In October 2011 Lachezar Kostov and pianist Viktor Valkov won the First Prize and all the special prizes at the Third International Liszt-Garrison Piano and Duo Competition in Baltimore, MD.
Mr. Kostov has appeared as a guest soloist and chamber musician throughout the United States, Japan, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and Bulgaria. Mr. Kostov is represented as a member of the Kostov-Valkov Duo by Pro-Piano Management. Hailed by European and American critics for “the awesome purity of his playing”, and described as “prodigiously skilled protagonist”, he made his official debut at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall in 2009, performing rarely heard works for cello and piano by Ellen Zwilich, Nikolay Roslavets, and Dimitri Kabalevsky.
Lachezar Kostov has appeared as a guest artist at the Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, La Jolla Summer Fest, Cactus Pear Music Festival. His major teachers include Bogomil Karakonov, Aldo Parisot, Norman Fischer, David Grigorian and Zvi Plesser; he has appeared in master-classes with Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Isserlis, and Bernard Greenhouse. Currently Mr. Kostov teaches at the Catholic University in Washington DC, and at the Baltimore School for the Arts.