At the piano, I find my truest self!
Music has accompanied me throughout my entire life and has repeatedly guided me toward new paths. I have had the privilege of participating in numerous masterclasses worldwide and working with exceptional pianists and pedagogues such as Lazar Berman, Prof. Germaine Mounier, Prof. Arnulf von Arnim, and Prof. Malcolm Bilson. These encounters have profoundly shaped me musically and repeatedly opened new perspectives for me.From 2003 to 2004, I received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for my advanced studies and professional development at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hannover in Germany. This time was a particularly valuable experience and significantly influenced my future path.
In the year 2000, I met Martin Panteleev. Soon after, we began performing together and gave numerous concerts in Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Spain. I cherish particularly beautiful memories of our performances at the Beethoven Hall in Bonn, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, and the Royal Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.
Beyond music, there is another great passion in my life: writing,drawing and composing. I have composed four musicals for children and have had the joy of bringing them successfully to the stage. Additionally, I have published two novels and was honored to receive an award for my literary debut in the category of children’s literature.
I love moving between different worlds—between music, literature, and stage. For me, it all belongs together: curiosity about what is new, the joy of meaningful encounters, and above all, the desire to touch people’s hearts through my art and to give them something of lasting value.
The thunderous applause is like an embrace for our souls as artists. It is the moment when all the passion, dedication, and effort we put into our art returns to us. Every round of applause touches us deeply and gives us the feeling that our art is reaching people’s hearts.
When you are bathed in magical lights, playing the piano beneath a century-old chestnut tree, it feels as if the leaves high above are softly murmuring with the piano’s voice.
Fabulous melodies arise, gently blending with the rustling of the leaves and causing the night to ring out tenderly. For a brief moment, music, nature, and light merge into a very special kind of magic.
Human beings are inseparably connected with nature. We see the world around us, we feel it deep in our souls, we hear and sense it.
An explosion of perception occurs when you have the chance to make music in the midst of a breathtaking mountain landscape – when music, nature, and soul merge with one another for a moment.
Performing in Barth holds a deeply special place in my heart. Twenty-five years ago, my husband Martin Panteleev and I founded the “Barth Chamber Music Days.” What began as a shared vision has become an essential part of our artistic journey. Each year, we create programs designed to move audiences, surprise them, and remain forever in their hearts. We search for music that speaks to the soul, for melodies that touch the deepest human experiences, and for moments that broaden our perspectives.
Music does not demand the grand stage. It craves intimacy.
This was the conviction that drew my husband Martin and me to establish the Owinger Musiktage many years ago. Not as a festival in the traditional mold – but as an open door to encounter, where artists and listeners meet on equal ground and together immerse themselves in music.
Chamber music stands in opposition to bombast. It is intimacy in its purest form – four, five, sometimes six musicians breathing as one, listening deeply, answering in kind. It is a dialogue conducted entirely in sound. And so we chose to plant this festival not in some grand concert hall, but in Owingen – a place intimate enough to carry an echo, yet expansive enough to embrace the world.
The Masterworks We Awakened:
Season after season, we search for music that speaks in stories and breaks boundaries.
We have lived Edward Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite for violin and piano – that fierce, Nordic song, wild and untamed. We have watched Camille Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals come alive beneath our hands – the music pirouetting, laughing, revealing the secret souls of creatures. And perpetually, we have returned to the Great Voices: Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms – those master architects who demonstrated that chamber music could contain universes.
More than this: In recent years, we have performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons – that living portrait of nature in all its manifestations. Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A minor, which marries the depths of chamber music with subtle dramatic eloquence. And Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations for violoncello – that elegant brilliance where classical restraint dances with virtuosic fire.
Year after year, Martin and I assemble programs designed to both surprise and move. We search not merely for works to be performed, but for works to be lived. We seek musicians who do not simply play, but who bear witness – who confess their deepest selves through sound. And we call for an audience that does not merely listen, but that opens their hearts.
This exists only because we are held – by our patrons, by Owingen itself, by a Kulturkreis that believes as we do. But most of all, because we are animated by a conviction so deep it guides every decision: that music is a transformative power, that it reaches into the hidden chambers of the human heart and changes everything it touches.
No grand theatre takes place in Owingen. What unfolds here is far more intimate, far more sacred: music ceases to be mere sound and becomes instead the only true language – the dialogue between soul and soul, the conversation that needs no words.
