State Opera Bourgas

Worth a detour

Burgas keeps an opera company with an orchestra, a chorus and a ballet, and puts on Carmen and Nabucco to houses that are mostly local. Tickets start around eleven euros, nobody dresses up much, and the standard is honest provincial repertory rather than international. If you have an evening and no fixed plan, look at what is on before you look at a restaurant.

Story

Background

The city's musical institutions came in sequence. The Burgas philharmonic became a state body in 1947. The opera began as an amateur enterprise: the curtain went up in Burgas for the first time on the twenty-fifth of June 1955, with Verdi's La Traviata. Thirty-six productions of opera, operetta and ballet had been staged before the opera section was taken over by the state in 1972, which is also the year the mixed chorus was formed; the first independent ballet production had come in 1958. The house on Kliment Ohridski Street shares its roof with the state puppet theatre, founded in 1954.

The repertoire is what a working provincial opera does: Bizet, Verdi, Puccini, a ballet or two, operetta, musicals, and a solid line of children's shows on Saturday mornings. Concerts by the orchestra are frequent and cheap. The company also tours the coast and the north in summer, so a night with nothing at home may mean the orchestra is in Balchik.

Two box offices sell tickets: the one at the opera itself, weekdays only, and a second at the Clock on the pedestrian street with longer hours and Saturday opening. Booking online works. From July to the beginning of September the programme moves outdoors to the Summer Theatre in the Sea Garden for the Emil Chakarov music festival, which is a better room than the opera house on a warm night and a worse one in wind. Surtitles are not to be relied on, so choose something you already know the plot of.