LidiyaYankovskaya

Lidiya Yankovskaya is a fiercely committed advocate for Slavic masterpieces and contemporary works on the leading edge of classical music. She has conducted more than 40 world premieres, including 17 operas, and her strength as a visionary collaborator has guided new perspectives on staged and symphonic repertoire from Carmen and Queen of Spades to Price and Prokofiev. Her transformative tenure as Music Director of Chicago Opera Theater earned consistent recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which named her Chicago an of the Year and credited her with “raising the profile of COT immensely, her interpretations bracing and repertoire head-spinningly varied.”

The 24/25 season opened with Yankovskaya’s successful Australian debut leading Puccini’s rarely performed Il trittico at Opera Australia, which resulted in an immediate re-engagement for a new production of Carmen in 2025. Elsewhere, she conducts La bohème with San Diego Opera and returns to Washington National Opera to lead The(R)evolution of Steve Jobs. She also appears with orchestras across the United States, conducting concerts in Nashville, Miami, Grand Rapids, Rochester, Albany, and Los Angeles. She returns to the United Kingdom, where The Guardian praised her reading of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as “visceral...refreshingly unsentimental,” to debut with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and join her long time collaborator, sarod grand master Amjad Ali Khan, at the London Philharmonic.

Yankovskaya has recently conducted Eugene Onegin at Staatsoper Hamburg, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and Bluebeard’s Castle at English National Opera, Rusalka at Santa Fe Opera, Carmen at Houston Grand Opera, Taking Up Serpents at Washington National Opera, and Don Giovanni at Seattle Opera. On the concert stage, high-profile engagements include appearances with the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics; concerts with Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and National Symphony Orchestras; and Julia Wolfe’s Anthracite Fields at Carnegie Hall.