Valery Polyansky is a Soviet and Russian conductor and musical figure, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, and the founder, artistic director, and chief conductor of the State Academic Symphony Capella of Russia. He was born in Moscow on April 19, 1949.
Polyansky graduated from the Music College at the Moscow Conservatory in 1967, studying with Yevgenia Zvereva, and continued at the conservatory. He studied choral conducting with Boris Kulikov and opera and symphonic conducting with Oskar Dimitriadi. As a postgraduate student, he studied with Gennady Rozhdestvensky, whose teaching strongly influenced his work.
He made his conducting debut in 1971 while still a student, leading the Moscow Conservatory’s student chamber choir. That year he also became a conductor at the Moscow Operetta Theatre. In 1975, his chamber choir won the gold medal in the academic singing category and the Golden Bell at the Guido d’Arezzo International Competition; Polyansky received a special prize as the competition’s best conductor. In 1977, while continuing to lead the choir, he became a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre.
Since 1992, Polyansky has led the State Academic Symphony Capella of Russia, an ensemble comprising a symphony orchestra and choir with more than 200 performers. His work brings together choral and symphonic conducting, and he has led orchestras in Belarus, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Germany, and Turkey. His repertoire ranges from classical and contemporary works to music that had gone unperformed for many years. He staged Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at the Gothenburg Musical Theatre and served for several years as chief conductor of Gothenburg’s Opera Evenings festival. Since 2000, he has conducted 23 operas.
Polyansky’s recordings include Bortnyansky’s concertos and Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, as well as Rachmaninoff’s symphonies, operas in concert performance, and choral works. His discography contains more than 80 records and includes works by Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Reger, Scriabin, Taneyev, Tchaikovsky, Schnittke, and Shostakovich. He is president of the Rachmaninoff Society and heads the Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition.
His distinctions include the title People's Artist of the Russian Federation and the Russian Federation State Prize in Literature and the Arts, awarded for his performances of works by Alfred Schnittke at the 1994 Schnittke Festival. In 2010, he received the Russian Government Prize in Culture for his concert series Opera in Concert.