Conductor Vladimir Jurowski comes from a Russian musical dynasty. Born in 1972 in Moscow, he makes his LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut this summer. His grandfather was a composer, his father Michail is an internationally acclaimed music director, and his younger brother Dmitri also conducts. What does Vladimir Jurowski feel about being part of this circle?

For a long time Vladimir Jurowski doubted whether he should actually pursue the same career as his father – after all, such a career choice would subject him to comparison, competition, and high-pressure expectations. “I’ve been through all the typical worries, insecurities, complexes, and phobias to which you allude,” he says. “But eventually I realized that I had to take it easy. I happen to have this talent and always wanted to do something involved with music, with theater. As a child I practically grew up in the theater – the Stanislavski Theater in Moscow – and at 5 I began to study music and play piano. When I was 15 I started to study music theater and composition. All my friends were composers. Once I conducted a work by one of my friends for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, and even though I had no idea how to conduct at that point, somehow it all worked. And then my father taught me. After the fall of the Berlin Wall – I was 18 at the time – the family moved to Dresden, where I studied for 2 years at the Carl Maria von Weber College of Music and then at the Hanns Eisler College of Music in Berlin.”

In record time Jurowski’s career began a meteoric ascent. In 1995 he made his international debut at the Wexford Festival, in 1998 came his first appearances at Covent Garden in London, at the Paris Opera, and at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice, with his entrée at the Metropolitan Opera following in 1999 and, in 2001, his appointment as Music Director of the Glyndebourne Festival. Despite his passion for music theater, Vladimir Jurowski anticipates even more involvement in the concert hall as he looks ahead. As Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic, where his tenure began in 2007, he has long since developed a wide repertoire. Jurowski singles out conductors such as Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Carlos Kleiber, and Charles Mackerras as his models: “I like people who have a very distinctive personality: people who aren’t in the least insincere and who don’t wear masks but simply live as they are,” he confides.

Vladimir Jurowski’s hallmarks as an artist include thoughtful and challenging programs that feature thematic consistency, as his choices for Lucerne attest. On 11 August he will lead the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in two musical adaptations of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” while exactly one month later, on 11 September, he will spend an evening with his London Philharmonic Orchestra devoted to the myth of Prometheus.