Lidiya Yankovskaya enjoys a season of podium firsts, including her Civic debut

Santa Fe Opera. Los Angeles Philharmonic. English National Opera. New York Philharmonic. Staatsoper Hamburg. National Symphony Orchestra.

Lidiya Yankovskaya has made or will soon make her debut with all of these prominent musical organizations and more in 2022-23 — perhaps the headiest season so far for this fast-rising, Chicago-based conductor. “It’s been very busy, but it’s great,” she said. “It’s a privilege to work with all these amazing organizations, and I’ve also been lucky to do a really wide range of repertoire with all of them.” 

Also on that list of debuts is her first performance March 6 with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, a pre-professional training ensemble of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. For Chicago audiences who know Yankovskaya best as music director of Chicago Opera Theater, this is an opportunity to see and hear her in a different context.

The Civic program is anchored by Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11 in G Minor, Op. 103 (The Year 1905), a 1957 work that looks back to the 1905 Russian Revolution. “It’s one of my favorite pieces in general,” the Russian-American conductor said. “It’s also a work that is close to my heart, because of my own background and my family history. I’m from St. Petersburg, and my great-grandparents were very involved in the [Russian] Revolution.”

She is excited to do the piece with the Civic Orchestra, because, as a training orchestra, it has more rehearsals than a typical professional orchestra. The extra time will permit a more detailed exploration of what she called the “very minute specifics” of the piece.

The symphony is preceded by Hymn for Everyone by Jessie Montgomery, the CSO’s Mead Composer-in-Residence. The CSO commissioned the work and performed the world premiere last spring. Yankovskaya and Montgomery were previously acquainted, and they got to know each other better when the conductor led the composer’s Sergeant McCauley as part of a CSO MusicNOW program in October. Of the instrumental hymn, Yankovskaya said, “it was written in part as a response to the pandemic and some of the political upheavals that took place after the pandemic, so I think it ties so nicely to the Shostakovich [symphony].”

When leading an orchestra for the first time, Yankovskaya said, one doesn’t know the players and what repertoire might work best with them. “So you have to be very thoughtful and do your research and hope that what you’re imagining will work in the way that you imagined,” she said. Orchestras play and respond differently, so there is always an initial period when the musicians feel out the conductor and vice versa. But once a conductor gets a sense of how an orchestra works together and approaches its music-making, the collaboration starts becoming easier.

“The music that we create today is what represents our culture, what represents our society and what will continue to represent it into the future.” — Lidiya Yankovskaya

Athough opera has been and continues to be an important part of the conductor’s activities, Yankovskaya, 36, strives to split her time more or less evenly between it and symphonic music. “In Chicago,” she said, “because I run Chicago Opera Theater, people tend to see me as more in the opera world, but I started out as a symphonic conductor, working more in that realm and running a new-music ensemble. I’d say it’s been a balance, for which I’m very thankful for and very fortunate.”

In addition to putting an emphasis on Slavic repertoire and operatic rarities from the past, Yankovskaya has gained considerable attention for her work in new music. She has led more than 40 world premieres, including 17 operas. “To me,” she said, “the music that we create today is what represents our culture, what represents our society and what will continue to represent it into the future.”

Beyond debuts, she believes in supporting the musical creators of today by nurturing new work through commissions, workshops and other help. At Chicago Opera Theater, where Yankovskaya began her duties as music director in 2018-19, she established the Vanguard Initiative, which supports budding opera composers. It immerses the creators in all aspects of the field and provides funding and support for a new work written across a two-year residency.

When she arrived at Chicago Opera Theater, Yankovskaya didn’t feel like it had a clear artistic profile. Many of its offerings were co-productions and, despite an array of regional and American premieres, it had only done one world premiere in its more than 40-year history. So she conceived three pillars on which to base its artistic activities:

1. Presenting major historical works that for whatever reason have not been produced before in Chicago, such as Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta in 2018-19 and Szymanowski’s King Roger this season.
   
   
2. Showcasing contemporary American works, such as Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick in 2018-19, that have already become established but have not yet been produced in Chicago.
   
   
3. Developing new work and collaborating with living creators. Yankovskaya is responsible for nine past or upcoming world premieres at the company, including works by six composers of color.

“These come historically from what COT has been doing in Chicago,” she said of these three pillars. “They also embrace the current moment and placing ourselves on the map nationally and internationally.”

For Yankovskaya, conducting didn’t become her main focus until graduate school. After the St. Petersburg native immigrated at age 9 to the United States with her mother, Yankovskaya got her first taste of conducting in high school in Albany, N.Y., with the help of her orchestra teacher. When she enrolled at Vassar, she included conducting among her undergraduate pursuits, along with her main focus on piano, but she wasn’t thinking of it as a career. She also studied non-musical subjects, including languages and philosophy. “It became clear to me as I was looking at conservatory programs that pursuing just piano was not right for me, that sitting in a practice room alone for 6-7 hours alone and not studying non-musical things was not the right choice.”

When she was debating between a doctorate in philosophy or a master’s degree in conducting, she realized her heart lay with music, especially making music with others in the way that conducting allows. An added incentive was the full scholarship in conducting from Boston University.

At the time, she never really gave much thought to the scarcity of women on orchestra podiums. “I think that is one of the things that saved me,” she said. “In a way, I was very naïve about it. I just thought, I want to conduct and I’ll just conduct.” In retrospect, she realized that she was more than 30 years old when she saw a woman leading a professional orchestra for the first time. “Everywhere I went after college, I was constantly the first or the only, but I didn’t really didn’t think about it,” she said. In the end, she discovered that musicians didn’t care about her gender. They just cared that she knew the score and knew what she was doing on the podium.

Yankovskaya believes the rise of the #MeToo movement and the increased attention to gender diversity in classical music has meant more opportunities for women conductors. “There is more attention given to the subject, which is really great and really important,” she said. “And that attention is also allowing for people to get re-engaged and get engaged at higher-profile places, particularly women who have already been doing this for a while and doing it really well, but have somehow been overlooked prior to the current moment.”

That said, there is still much progress to be made. She points out that there continues to be only one woman who serves as the music director of a major American orchestra — Nathalie Stutzmann with the Atlanta Symphony. “I think that is a shame, and we should be past that,” Yankovskaya said. “There are so many people out there who are spectacular conductors who just haven’t gotten the recognition and opportunities that they deserve.”