Dmitri Kitaenko

b. 1940 (St. Petersburg)

Russia

Dmitri Georgievich Kitaenko is a Soviet and Russian conductor and music teacher, born on 18 August 1940 in Leningrad. He was born into the family of a teacher and an engineer; his father, Georgy Kitaenko, received the Stalin Prize.

After graduating from the Mikhail Glinka Choral School in 1958, Kitaenko entered the conducting and choral faculty of the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied with Yelena Kudryavtseva. He also studied opera and symphonic conducting with Eduard Grikurov. He graduated with distinction in 1963 and continued as a postgraduate student at the Moscow Conservatory, studying choral conducting with Aleksandr Khazanov and opera and symphonic conducting with Leo Ginzburg.

In 1966–1967 he trained at the Vienna Academy of Music, now the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, with Hans Swarowsky and Karl Österreicher, and attended Herbert von Karajan's seminars. From 1967 to 1969 he was a trainee conductor with the Opera Studio and the symphony orchestra of the music college attached to the Moscow Conservatory. He taught opera and symphonic conducting at the Moscow Conservatory from 1969 to 1996, becoming a professor in 1986.

Kitaenko was a conductor at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre from 1969 and its chief conductor from 1970 to 1976. During this period he took part in revivals of Bizet's Carmen, Shostakovich's Katerina Izmailova, Puccini's La bohème, and Prokofiev's ballet Cinderella, as well as productions of Rachmaninoff's Aleko and Stravinsky's Mavra. He also participated in Walter Felsenstein's 1973 production of Carmen at the Komische Oper in Berlin. From 1976 to 1990, he served as chief conductor and artistic director of the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic.

He has toured internationally with Soviet, Russian, and foreign symphony orchestras since 1969. From 1990 he worked abroad, serving as chief conductor of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1990 to 1996, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra from 1990 to 1998, the Bern Symphony Orchestra from 1990 to 2004, and the Korean Broadcasting System Symphony Orchestra from 1999 to 2004. He has worked with ensembles including the Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Gürzenich Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, and NHK Symphony Orchestra. He lives in Switzerland.

His operatic work includes productions of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the Vienna State Opera in 1982 and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov there in 1983. His repertoire has included music by Bach, Handel, Mozart, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Tikhon Khrennikov, Georgy Sviridov, and Kara Karayev. His recordings include complete symphony cycles by Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev, as well as Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, Khrennikov's Third Symphony, Vladimir Artemov's Requiem, six symphonies by Harald Sæverud, and works by Wagner.

Kitaenko won second prize at the first Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition in West Berlin in 1969. His distinctions include the title People's Artist of the USSR in 1984, the Lenin Komsomol Prize in 1980, the Mikhail Glinka State Prize of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1988, Romania's Order of Merit for Culture in the Music category in 2009, and the International Classical Music Award for Lifetime Achievement.

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