In 1961, she gave her first performance at La Scala in Milan, as Agnese in Bellini's Beatrice di Tenda, opposite Dame Joan Sutherland.

[1] She sang widely in Italy, Genoa, Venice, Parma and notably in Turin in 1973, as Elena in I vespri siciliani, in the only production ever directed by Maria Callas.

[2] Kabaivanska delivered a performance of the "Ave Maria" from the opera Otello by Giuseppe Verdi to open the funeral mass for Luciano Pavarotti in Modena, Italy on 8 September 2007.

Kabaivanska also played the Comtesse in Tchaikowsky's Queen of Spades, in a series of five performances (31 January – 19 February 2008) at the Capitole de Toulouse.

She is a professor in Italy at the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, at the Vecchi-Tonelli Music Institute in Modena, and at New Bulgarian University in Sofia.