Born in Saint Petersburg and educated at the Cappella Boys
Music School and the conservatory there, Vasily Petrenko currently is chief conductor
of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, principal conductor of the
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, and principal guest conductor of the
Mikhailovsky Theatre. In the 2013/14 season, he will take up the position of chief
conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra.
Petrenko has worked with major orchestras including the London
Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia, Russian National Orchestra, Netherlands Radio
Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Orchestre National de France, Finnish Radio
Symphony, NHK Symphony in Tokyo, Sydney Symphony, the Accademia Nazionale di
Santa Cecilia, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco and Boston symphonies and the Philadelphia Orchestra. He appears annually at the BBC Proms, and he has
toured with the European Union Youth Orchestra. Recent highlights include his
debuts with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C.; the Czech Philharmonic;
Vienna Symphony; Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin; and the Orchestre de la
Suisse Romande.
Petrenko’s operatic engagements include Macbeth
at Glyndebourne Festival Opera; Eugene Onegin at
the Paris Opera; Le villi, I due Foscari and Boris Godunov for
the Netherlands Reisopera; and Pique Dame at the Hamburg
State Opera. Upcoming engagements include his debut at the Zurich Opera with Carmen and Carmen and The Flying Dutchman at the Mikhailovsky Theatre.
Recordings with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
include Fleishman’s Rothschild’s Violin and
Shostakovich’s The Gamblers; Rachmaninov’s Second
and Third Symphonies, complete piano concertos, Symphonic Dances and Isle of the Dead; a series of recordings for Naxos
including Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, which won
the 2009 Gramophone Award for Best Orchestral Recording; and an ongoing
Shostakovich symphony cycle.
In October 2007, Petrenko was named Young Artist of the Year
at the annual Gramophone Awards. He won the Male Artist of the Year at the
Classic Brit Awards in 2010 and 2012, and the ECHO Klassik Award for Newcomer
of the Year (Conductor) in 2012. He is only the second person to have been
awarded honorary doctorates by both the University of Liverpool and Liverpool
Hope University. This year, he received an Honorary Fellowship from Liverpool
John Moores University.
