Semyon Bychkov

The conductor Semyon Bychkov, who was born in Leningrad in 1952 and has been a U.S. citizen since 1983, studied at the Glinka Conservatory in his native city, won the Rachmaninoff Competition in 1973, and emigrated to the United States in 1975, where he continued his training at the Mannes College of Music in New York. After early appearances with American orchestras, he stepped in on several occasions in 1984 for prominent colleagues who had fallen ill, giving his career decisive momentum. He soon made his debuts with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Berliner Philharmoniker, which immediately engaged him for an international tour. Bychkov served as Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1989 to 1998; from 1999 to 2003, he was Chief Conductor of the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden; from 1997 to 2010, he led the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne; and since 2018, he has been Chief Conductor of the Czech Philharmonic. He will step down from that post in 2028 to assume the position of Music Director of the Opéra national de Paris. He also currently holds the Günter Wand Conducting Chair with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and teaches on the Otto Klemperer Conducting Chair at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Bychkov is a regular guest with many of the world’s leading orchestras and opera houses. In the 2025-26 season, he conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester, the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Berliner Philharmoniker, and the New York Philharmonic. At the Opéra national de Paris, he led a new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, and at the Bayreuth Festival in 2024-25 he conducted Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Bychkov was named Conductor of the Year at the International Opera Awards in 2015; in 2022, he received the same distinction from Musical America. His recording of Smetana’s Má vlast was named Orchestral Recording of the Year 2025 by BBC Music Magazine.

Lucerne Festival (IMF) debut on 7 September 1991 with the Orchestre de Paris in a program of works by Prokofiev and Berlioz; most recent appearance here was on 12 September 2015, when he led the Vienna Philharmonic in music by Haydn, Wagner, and Brahms.

May 2026