Yuri Temirkanov

The musical career of the Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov, who was born in 1938 in Nalchik in the foothills of the Caucasus, has been closely linked with the city of St. Petersburg. He moved to what was then known as Leningrad at the age of 13 to take up his studies in violin and viola, later completing Ilya Musin’s conducting class at the Conservatory. Temirkanov won the All-Soviet National Conducting Competition in 1966 and was entrusted with leading the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra on a tour through Europe and America. He took on his first leadership position with the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra in 1968 and was appointed to head the Kirov Theater, known today as the Mariinsky Theater, in 1976. For a dozen years, he was responsible for guiding this acclaimed company and also appeared there as a director. Since 1988 he has served as head of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, which he conducts on tours all over the world. Temirkanov has also had a successful career in the West. He helmed the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London from 1992 to 1998 as well as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2000 to 2006, and he was music director of the Teatro Regio in Parma from 2010 to 2012. Temirkanov has additionally conducted the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, the Dresden Staatskapelle, the London Symphony Orchestra, and La Scala in Milan; in the United States, he has led the major orchestras of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Yuri Temirkanov has been awarded all four degrees of the Russian Order “For Merit for the Country.” In Italy, he received the Premio Abbiati in 2003 and in 2007 and, in 2014, the Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli Prize. In the fall of 2015, he was named Honorary Conductor of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia.

LUCERNE FESTIVAL (IMF) debut on 5 September 1992 with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in a program of Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky.

July 2018