Mikhail Yurovsky

Mikhail Yurovsky

1945 (Moscow) — 2022 (Berlin)

Mikhail Yurovsky (1945–2022) was a Soviet and German conductor. He was born in Moscow into a musical Jewish family. His father was composer Vladimir Yurovsky, and his grandfather was conductor David Block.

Yurovsky graduated from the music college attached to the Moscow Conservatory, where Dmitri Blum was one of his most important teachers. He studied at the Conservatory’s theory faculty, taking opera and symphonic conducting with Leo Ginzburg and music theory with Alexander Kandinsky. He worked as an assistant to Gennady Rozhdestvensky with the Big Symphony Orchestra of All-Union Radio and Central Television, then conducted the Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre from 1972 to 1989 and the Bolshoi Theatre.

In 1989, he moved with his family to Germany. From 1989 to 1996, he conducted at the Semper Opera in Dresden. He was chief conductor and music director of the Northwest German Philharmonic from 1992 to 1998. In 1995, the orchestra gave the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s unfinished opera The Gamblers, completed by Krzysztof Meyer, with soloists from the Bolshoi Theatre. From 1999, Yurovsky worked at the Volkstheater Rostock and with the Northwest German Philharmonic. He was a guest conductor with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and orchestras in Malmö, Copenhagen, Odense, and Buenos Aires. He served as chief conductor of the Leipzig Opera from 1999 to 2001 and, from 2006, as principal conductor of the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne.

In 2001, he was nominated for a Grammy Award for recordings of orchestral music by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2012, he received the International Shostakovich Award. His wife was Eleonora Yurovskaya, née Taratuta. Their sons, Vladimir and Dmitri Yurovsky, became conductors, and their daughter, Maria Dribinskaya, became a pianist, accompanist, and teacher. Yurovsky died in Berlin in 2022.

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