Maestro Semyon Bychkov (Conductor)
Born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1952, Semyon Bychkov was 20 when he won
the Rachmaninov Conducting Competition. Two years later, having been
denied his prize of conducting the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, he left the
former Soviet Union where, from the age of five, he had been singled out for an
extraordinarily privileged education in music. First studying piano,
Bychkov was then selected to study at the Glinka Choir School and received his
first conducting lesson aged 13. Four years later he enrolled at the
Leningrad Conservatory where he studied conducting with the legendary Ilya
Musin.
By the time Bychkov returned to St Petersburg in 1989 as the
Philharmonic’s Principal Guest Conductor, he had enjoyed success in the US as
Music Director of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo
Philharmonic. His international career, which had begun in France where he
made his debuts with the Opéra de Lyon and at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, had
taken off when a series of high-profile cancellations resulted in invitations to
conduct the New York Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic and Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestras. In 1989, he was named Music Director of the Orchestre de
Paris; in 1997, Chief Conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne; and, the
following year, Chief Conductor of the Dresden Semperoper.
Semyon
Bychkov’s approach to music making combines innate musicality with the rigours
of Russian pedagogy. With his time carefully balanced between the concert
hall and the opera house, Bychkov conducts repertoire that spans four
centuries.
In the opera house, Bychkov is recognised for his
interpretation of Strauss, Wagner and Verdi. Nonetheless, while Principal
Guest Conductor of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, his productions of Janáček’s
Jenufa, Schubert’s Fierrabras, Puccini’s La bohème, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth
of Mtsensk and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov were awarded the prestigious Premio
Abbiati. Most recently, Semyon Bychkov conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene
Onegin at the Royal Opera House – his recording of the work was chosen by Opera
Magazine as one of the 30 ‘all-time great recordings’; and Wagner’s Parsifal at
Madrid’s Teatro Real. He will open the 2016-17 season at Covent Garden
with a new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte, and in spring 2017, will
conduct Parsifal at the Wiener Staatsoper.
Bychkov began the 2015-16
season on tour with the Vienna Philharmonic, including concerts at the BBC
Proms, Lucerne Festival and the Enescu Festival in Bucharest, and later in the
year, conducted the Orchestra’s annual Schönbrunn concert to an audience of over
100,000. The concert was broadcast live across the world and released by
Sony Classical on both CD and DVD. In the US, he conducted the Chicago
Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles
Philharmonic; while in Europe, he returned for engagements with the Munich
Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestra
dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, as well as beginning a long-term
Tchaikovsky project with the Czech Philharmonic and touring with the Royal
Concertgebouw Orchestra.
Bychkov’s recording career began in 1986 when he
signed with Philips and began a significant collaboration which produced an
extensive discography with the Berlin Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio, Royal
Concertgebouw, Philharmonia, London Philharmonic and Orchestre de Paris.
These were later followed by a series of benchmark recordings, the result of his
13-year collaboration (1997-2010) with WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. The
repertoire includes a complete cycle of Brahms Symphonies, and works by Strauss
(Elektra, Daphne, Ein Heldenleben, Metamorphosen, Alpensinfonie, Till
Eulenspiegel), Mahler (Symphony No. 3, Das Lied von der Erde), Shostakovich
(Symphony Nos. 4, 7, 8, 10, 11), Rachmaninov, Verdi (Requiem), Detlev Glanert
and York Höller. His recording of Lohengrin was voted BBC Music Magazine’s
Record of the Year in 2010. In October 2016, Decca will release the first
CD of the Tchaikovsky Project, a long-term collaboration with the Czech
Philharmonic which will encompass all of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, featuring
Symphony No. 6 Pathétique coupled with Romeo & Juliet
Fantasy-Overture.
Semyon Bychkov currently holds the Klemperer
Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, and the Gunther Wand Chair
with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with whom he appears annually at the BBC
Proms. The International Opera Awards named Semyon Bychkov 2015’s
Conductor of the Year.
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