ALBUMEdward TulanePaola Prestini, Mark Campbell, Minnesota Opera, Lidiya Yankovskaya & Kate DiCamillo
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ALBUMEdward TulanePaola Prestini, Mark Campbell, Minnesota Opera, Lidiya Yankovskaya & Kate DiCamillo
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About Lidiya Yankovskaya
Artist Biography
Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya became the sole woman to lead a major American opera company when she was named music director of the Chicago Opera Theater in 2017. Yankovskaya cultivates the difficult specialties of Russian music, rare operas, and contemporary music.
Yankovskaya was born on March 26, 1986, in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), in the Soviet Union. She began studies as a ballerina at three but switched to music at five, taking piano lessons and singing in the Children's Chorus of St. Petersburg Radio and Television. Her introduction to opera came when she attended a performance of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges at the Mariinsky Theater. Yankovskaya and her mother were of Jewish background, and when Yankovskaya was nine, they moved to the U.S. in search of a more tolerant climate. Yankovskaya studied at Hebrew schools in upstate New York and then at Guilderland High School outside of Albany. She took piano and violin classes, and when she was 17, she won the school's concerto competition with a Mozart piano concerto performance. During rehearsals for that performance, a teacher suggested that Yankovskaya try conducting from the piano, and she then advanced to conducting a Dvořák symphony. Yankovskaya attended Vassar College, studying music and philosophy. During her junior year, she settled on a conducting career, and she went on for a master's degree at Boston University. Her teachers and mentors have included Lorin Maazel, Marin Alsop, and Kenneth Kiesler. Further training came at the Dallas Opera's Hart Institute for Women Conductors in 2015.
Yankovskaya began her career as an associate conductor with Boston's Juventas New Music Ensemble. In 2010, she became the group's music director, remaining in that position until 2017. She also served as the music director of Harvard University's Lowell House Opera and the Commonwealth Lyric Theater, and as the artistic director at the Boston New Music Festival. Yankovskaya made guest conducting appearances at Washington National Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, and the Spoleto Festival, as well as other organizations. She has also conducted symphony orchestras in various cities, including Mobile, Alabama, Flagstaff, Arizona, and Oviedo, Spain, and in the mid-2010s, she responded to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis by forming a new group called the Refugee Orchestra Project, which performed in Cambridge (MA), Boston, New York, and Washington. In 2017, she was named to her post at the Chicago Opera Theater, taking up the baton full-time the following year.
After recordings in 2012 and 2014 with the Cleveland Contemporary Players and the Juventas New Music Ensemble, respectively, in 2020, Yankovskaya made her opera recording debut, leading a performance of Ricky Ian Gordon's opera Ellen West. ~ James Manheim
Hometown
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Genre
Classical
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