Yuri Simonov

Yuri Simonov

b. 1941 (Saratov)

Yuri Simonov is a Soviet and Russian conductor, music teacher, and professor. He was born in Saratov on March 4, 1941, into a family of opera singers and showed an early interest in conducting.

He studied violin at music school and first conducted a school orchestra at age twelve, leading Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. In 1956 he moved to Leningrad, where he attended the special music school attached to the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory. He later studied viola with Yuri Kramarov, graduating in 1965, and operatic and symphonic conducting with Nikolai Rabinovich, graduating in 1968. From 1958, he taught and conducted orchestral classes at music schools and colleges in Leningrad. Between 1962 and 1969, he was chief conductor of the People’s Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra at the Vyborg Palace of Culture, and from 1967 to 1969 he led the Kislovodsk Philharmonic Orchestra.

After winning first prize at the 1968 conducting competition of Rome’s Santa Cecilia Academy, Simonov was invited to work with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Evgeny Mravinsky, where he stayed for about a year. He made his Bolshoi Theatre debut in 1969 conducting Verdi’s Aida and became the theatre’s chief conductor the following year, remaining in the post until 1985. Under his direction, the Bolshoi presented the premiere of Rodion Shchedrin’s ballet Anna Karenina in 1972 and revived Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Golden Age in 1982. In 1979, he founded the Bolshoi Chamber Orchestra.

Simonov toured Europe, Japan, and the United States with opera and ballet companies and with the Bolshoi Chamber Orchestra. He conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at London’s Royal Opera House in 1982 and returned there to conduct Verdi’s La traviata four years later. His international opera engagements also included Verdi’s Aida in Birmingham, Don Carlos in Los Angeles and Hamburg, and The Force of Destiny in Marseille; Mozart’s Così fan tutte in Genoa; Strauss’s Salome in Florence; and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades in Dallas, Budapest, and Prague. After leaving the Bolshoi, he led the State Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 1989.

From 1991, Simonov worked with orchestras and opera houses internationally. He became principal guest conductor of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991 and conducted Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina at San Francisco Opera that year. In 1993, he led a production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades at the Paris Opera. He served as music director of the National Orchestra of Belgium from 1994 to 2002 and conducted Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Budapest Opera from 1995 to 1998. Since 1998, he has led the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic.

Simonov’s repertoire includes Russian and international classical music, as well as works by twentieth-century Soviet composers. He has conducted more than two hundred programs in Moscow with the Moscow Philharmonic orchestra and toured with it in Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, China, South Korea, and Japan. His recordings have appeared on Melodiya, EMI, Collins Classics, Cypres, Hungaroton, Le Chant du Monde, Pannon Classic, Sonora, and Tring International, and filmed performances from the Bolshoi have also been released.

He taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1978 to 1991 and became a professor there in 1985. Since 2006, he has taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and has given master classes in Russia and abroad, including in London, Tel Aviv, Almaty, and Riga. From 1994 to 2008, he ran summer international conducting courses in Budapest and Miskolc, attended by more than one hundred young conductors from thirty countries. He founded the Liszt-Wagner Orchestra in Budapest in 2001 and has served on the juries of conducting competitions in Florence, Tokyo, and Budapest. His honors include the titles of People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and People's Artist of the USSR, the 1968 first prize at the Santa Cecilia Academy conducting competition, and the Lenin Komsomol Prize for his contribution to opera.

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