Around the Music Festival

Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov has resigned as Music Director and Principal Conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra on January 31st. Temirkanov has been leading the orchestra for 30 years, following his predecessor Evgeni Mravinsky since 1988.

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra is a prestigious orchestra that was called the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra during the Soviet era.

The Orchestra was established in 1882 as a court orchestra during the Romanov dynasty, it was trained by the legendly conductor Mravinsky from 1938 before the war, and made its name as the highest orchestra of the Soviet Union.

Temirkanov was born in 1938 in Nalchik, the capital of the Republic of Kabardino-Balkar (a republic in the southeastern part of Russia on the north side of the Great Caucasus Mountains, bordering Georgia).

After he studied violin and viola, he learned conducting with Ilya Musin, a famous leader at the Leningrad Conservatory. He made his conductor debut in 1965 at the Mikhailovsky Theater in St. Petersburg with the opera “La Traviata”.

Since then, he has served as the principal conductor of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra (now the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra) from 1968 to 1976. From 1977 until he became the successor to Mravinsky, he was the artistic director and chief conductor of the Kirov Theater (now the Mariinsky Theater).

In 1992, he became the principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the United Kingdom, and since 1998 he has been the Conductor Laureate. After that, he was the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 1998 to 2006.

He currently lives in the United Kingdom and was hailed as a “People’s Artist” during the Soviet era and has won numerous awards even during the Russian era.

The successor is 65-year-old Nikolai Alexeyev, who has been the deputy artistic director since 2000. He studied chorus conducting with Avenir Mikhailov and conducting with Mariss Jansons at the Leningrad Conservatory. He has won prizes in the 1982 Herbert von Karajan Conductor Competition and the 1985 Václav Talich Conductor Competition.

He has been the conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra since 2000. He was the Principal Conductor of the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra from 2001 to 2010, establishing his reputation.

He has been in charge of the opening and closing concerts of the season since the 2018/2019 season at the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra.

写真：IMG