Yuri Serebryakov

Yuri Serebryakov was a Soviet and Russian conductor and professor. He was born on May 28, 1939, in Leningrad, USSR. He was born into the family of the pianist Pavel Serebryakov, who was rector of the Leningrad Conservatory.

In 1966 he graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in opera and symphonic conducting, studying in the class of Yevgeny Mravinsky, People's Artist of the USSR. After graduation he completed a two-year internship at the Leningrad Philharmonic, and then spent another two years as Mravinsky's assistant. He toured actively throughout the USSR and abroad.

He collaborated with such soloists as Mikhail Vaiman, Boris Gutnikov, Bella Davidovich, Mischa Maisky, Mstislav Rostropovich, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Mikhail Gantvarg, Pavel Serebryakov, and Grigory Sokolov. Under his direction, the conservatory's opera studio staged two ballets, Icarus and Ravel's Bolero, as well as Andrei Knaifel's opera The Canterville Ghost. In parallel, he also completed a two-year internship at the Bolshoi Theatre of the USSR as a ballet conductor under the guidance of Algis Zhuraitis.

From 1977 to 1987 he worked as conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the State Committee for Cinematography of the USSR in Moscow. Under his direction, music was recorded for more than 300 feature and documentary films, among the best known being Sibiriada, A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov, The Tale of Wanderings, TASS Is Authorized to Declare..., and Hot Summer in Kabul. He also recorded a long-playing album of Eduard Artemyev's music for the film Sibiriada, issued in Paris by Le Chant du Monde.

Beginning in 1963, he directed the Youth Chamber Orchestra at the Special Music School attached to the Leningrad Conservatory for several years and continued to lead it at the Conservatory. Some of the students who played in the orchestra later became prominent musicians, including Olga Martynova, Mikhail Gantvarg, Mischa Maisky, Boris Pergamenshchikov, Philipp Hirschhorn, and Vladimir Stopichev.

Until 1977 he taught in the department of symphonic conducting. Among his students were R. E. Martynov, A. Lukoshyavichyus, A. R. Paulavichyus, E. Karasik, and Nikolai Alekseyev. In 1964 he also appeared in the role of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the film Executed at Dawn.... During the last thirty years of his life he lived at his father's former dacha in the settlement of Komarovo near St. Petersburg. He died on January 15, 2016, in St. Petersburg and was buried at the Literatorskie Footbridges section of Volkovo Cemetery.