Semyon Maevich Bychkov |

Semyon Bychkov

Semyon Bychkov was born in 1952 in Leningrad. In 1970 he graduated from the Glinka Choir School and entered the Leningrad Conservatory in the class of Ilya Musin. Participated as a conductor in a student production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. In 1973 he won first prize at the Rachmaninoff Conducting Competition. In 1975 he emigrated to the United States due to the inability to conduct a full-fledged concert activity. In New York he entered the musical man’s college, where in 1977 he staged a student production of Iolanta by Tchaikovsky. Since 1980 he has been Principal Conductor of the Grand Rapide Orchestra in Michigan, and in 1985 he headed the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra.

Bychkov’s European operatic debut was Mozart’s The Imaginary Gardener at the Aix-en-Provence Festival (1984). In 1985 he first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he later made his first recordings (compositions by Mozart, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky). From 1989 to 1998 he led the Paris Orchestra, while continuing to work in the opera. The most notable production of this period is Eugene Onegin at the Châtelet Theater in Paris with Dmitri Hvorostovsky in the title role (1992).

From 1992 to 1998, Semyon Bychkov was the chief guest conductor of the Florentine Musical May festival. Here, with his participation, Janacek’s Jenufa, Puccini’s La Boheme, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Mozart’s Idomeneo, Schubert’s Fierabras, Wagner’s Parsifal, and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District were staged. In 1997, the conductor made his debut at La Scala (Tosca by Puccini), in 1999 at the Vienna State Opera (Electra by Strauss). Then he became the musical director of the Dresden Opera, which he headed until 2003.

In 2003, Maestro Bychkov made his debut at Covent Garden (Electra). He remembers this work with special warmth. In 2004, he made his first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera (Boris Godunov). In the summer of the same year, Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, one of the best productions of the festival in recent years, was staged at the Salzburg Festival under his direction. Bychkov’s recent works also include a number of operas by Verdi and Wagner.

In 1997, Bychkov took over as chief conductor of the West German Radio Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. He toured with this group in many countries of the world, including Russia in 2000. He has made a number of recordings on CD and DVD, including all Brahms symphonies, a number of symphonies by Shostakovich and Mahler, compositions by Rachmaninov and Richard Strauss, Wagner’s Lohengrin. He also works with the symphony orchestras of New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, the Bavarian Radio Orchestra, the Munich and London Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Every year he conducts concerts at La Scala. In 2012, he plans to stage Richard Strauss’s opera The Woman Without a Shadow on its stage.

According to the press release of the information department of the IGF