Ilan Volkov

The son of concert pianist Alexander Volkov and historian Shulamit Volkov, Ilan Volkov was born in Tel Aviv in 1976. He initially studied violin with Chaim Taub, the longtime concertmaster of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, piano with his father, and composition with Abel Ehrlich; subsequently, he completed Mendi Rodan’s conducting class at the Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem and graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London. Volkov began his career in 1995 as Young Conductor in Association with the Northern Sinfonia; in 1999 he became assistant to Seiji Ozawa with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He took up his first principal position with the London Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in 1997. From 2003 to 2009, Volkov was Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and from 2011 to 2014 he was Music Director of the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. An advocate of new music, he has appeared at the Salzburg Festival, the Edinburgh Festival, the BBC Proms, Musikprotokoll Graz, and the Berlin Festival. Volkov is also much in demand in opera and conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at San Francisco Opera, Britten’s A Midsummer Night's Dream and Peter Grimes at the Glyndebourne Festival, Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Ernest with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, Bach’s Actus tragicus at the Stuttgart State Opera, and Olga Neuwirth’s The Outcast in Vienna and Hamburg. In July 2021, he led the premiere of Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s L’Apocalypse Arabe at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, and in August he devoted himself to Morton Feldman's Neither at the Salzburg Festival. Together with Ilya Gringolts, Ilan Volkov founded the I&I Foundation in 2020 to promote new music. He has a rich discography, and his recording of Britten’s works for piano and orchestra won the Gramophone Award.

July 2021