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Yuri Temirkanov is the artistic director of St.Petersburg Philharmonic
Society and has for 17 years been heading the St.Petersburg Philharmonic
Orchestra. The 
maestro’s
creative biography and his career are closely connected with St.Petersburg.
In autumn this year Yuri Temirkanov’s orchestra was the first of Russian
orchestras to open a new season in Carnegie Hall in the United States.
Its performance made the much demanding American public gasp in admiration.
“Yuri Temirkanov strikes the audiences by emotional drive, original interpretation of the pieces his orchestra plays and by personal charismatic influence on the musicians. He possesses so graphically expressive a technique that the public not only hears but feels the harmony he creates in the orchestra by a single wave of his conductor stick” – “The New York Times” wrote in those days.
“Undoubtedly, Yuri Temirkanov belongs to the most innovative of Russian conductor schools”, - the British “Guardian” wrote following the recent tour of St.Petersburg Philharmonic Society in Britian. There’s something subtle in the quality of sound that comes out from the musicians, particularly in the Slavic repertoire, and it is what the Russians call “soul”.
Yuri Temirkanov was mastering the profession of orchestra conductor in St.Petersburg. Born in Nalchik, Kabardino-Balkaria, he was admitted to the Petersburg School for Endowed Children at the age of 9. After school he went on to study at Conservatory in the class of Professor Ilya Musin. His teacher and mentor, as he sees it, was Yevgeny Mravinski, a celebrated conductor who directed his orchestra for more than 50 years and whom Yuri Temirkanov succeeded in the post after his death.
“I’ve been with the orchestra for a long time, - Yuri Temirkanov says, - and I should say we’ve preserved every good point it has ever had. And I hope we’ll be able to augment the pluses considerably”.
Yuri Temirkanov thinks in large-scale categories and is endowed with artistic will and a subtle sense of form. With a markedly pronounced temper he communicates with his orchestra by a brief, accurate and exclusively beautiful gesture. His most favourite saying is that music defers a musical authority only.
“I know nothing of the conductor profession, - the maestro jokes. – A conductor must be something like a preacher. Like preachers repeat what someone said before we repeat the words of musical geniuses. But we try to reach out to every genius to know what worried him, what made him excited and what he cried over so we get it to the public. This is how a conductor works. And not only a conductor but any musician as he appears on stage”.
Yuri Temirkanov is one of the most sought after Russian conductors in the West. Working abroad with celebrated orchestras Temirkanov quickly won popularity as interpreter of Russian symphony music, even though his repertoire is full of western music too. His favourites are Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss and Ravel.
Among other maestros Temirkanov is known as a brilliant opera conductor. For 13 years he led the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet Theatre in St.Petersburg and directed at the world’s top operas. In the recent years, however, the musician hasn’t been seen at the head of an opera orchestra very often. The maestro says this is because the theatricals have taken upper hand over music: “Opera as a genre is losing its positions worldwide because it has turned into production. But this is far from serving a high genre. Everything has become a show, a public stunt, if you want, and it reduces the great mission of music to zero”.
For this very reason Yuri Temirkanov is giving preference to symphony music and vocal and symphony genre.
An innate passion for art drives Yuri Temirkanov beyond the boundaries of his profession. Seven years ago he initiated a winter festival, called “The Square of Arts”. There is a square in downtown St.Petersburg that is surrounded on all sides by artistic organizations – the Philharmonic Society, the Russian Museum, the Komissarzhevskaya Drama Theatre and the Mussorgsky Maly Opera Theatre. All of them are taking part in the winter musical event, which brings together participants and guests from different countries.
“I’m happy that the festival is gaining strength and elevates to a level higher each year, - Yuri Temirkanov says. – Many guests, even from the United States, let alone Italy, France and other European countries, keep coming back every year. This year the festival will be called “Shostakovich and His Time”, so we’re the first to launch celebrations for the composer’s 100th jubilee on September 25th 2006. It isn’t just a festival of Shostakovich’s music. You feel the grandeur of such a figure when you play what other musicians of his day wrote. Thus we see the difference: that is no good, and that is a masterpiece. Shostakovich was a genius!”
For participation in the Festival “Square of Arts 2005”, which
is underway in Petersburg from December 28th 2005 to January 7th 2006,
Yuri Temirkanov has invited conductor Maxim Shostakovich, singers Barbara
Hendrix and Dmitry Khvorostovski, and violinists Vadim Repin and Vladimir
Spivakov.
