CSOradio
CSOradio
When Lidiya Yankovskaya makes her Orchestra Hall debut on Feb. 19 in a children’s concert featuring Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Jessie Montgomery’s Starburst, she’ll be fully in her element, conducting a Russian work and a piece from a living composer.
In her podium career until now, and in her tenure as music director of the Chicago Opera Theater since 2017, Yankovskaya has championed with equal passion the lesser-known Russian Romantic-era repertoire (such as American premieres of Rimsky-Korsakov’s First Symphony and Anton Rubinstein’s The Demon, and Chicago productions of Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Rachmaninov’s Aleko) and partnerships with living composers.
Working with living composers “who answer e-mails when I have a question about the music” ranks high among her priorities and is “very rewarding.” She also believes in giving creative artists a space “to try things out, fail and then get them right,” which is what used to happen in the past, when the life of orchestras and opera companies was “less tightly regulated and there were more rehearsals, or something would just flop and the composer would be able to make changes before the next performance, or just write something else.”
This is what she strives to do at COT with the Vanguard Initiative, in which budding opera composers “live with the company” for two years and are paired up with an experienced librettist to write an opera that the company then presents.
Yankovskaya is equally at home in the symphonic and operatic realms, and she especially enjoys the “big Romantic repertoire.” She was fortunate to train simultaneously as a choral and symphonic conductor at Boston University, something that “doesn’t often happen in European and Russian conservatories, where conductors need to do a lot of choral conducting before they can work with orchestras.” Before that, she was trained as a violinist and pianist, but she also studied philosophy at Vassar College and is proficient in several languages, a skill that helped her greatly in her opera work.
Peter and the Wolf, which Members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform in two CSO Family Matinees on Feb. 19, will be a joy to conduct, she says, because it is such a popular piece for children both here and in her native Russia. “Prokofiev wasn’t even fully aware of how popular the piece had become, with early animated film versions that delighted children in both countries,” she says. “This is real music steeped in the Russian folk tradition. Prokofiev did not try to simplify his language in the piece. Children are more open and sophisticated listeners than we give them credit for. They don’t care if we call the music tonal or atonal; as long as it captures their imagination, they will respond to it instinctively.”
She has vivid memories of attending classical music concerts in St. Petersburg as a young child. “We heard Stravinsky, Prokofiev, other Russian composers who are lesser known here, like [Mily] Balakirev,” she says. “None of it felt ‘difficult’ because so much of the music stemmed from Russian folklore.”
Attracting younger and more diverse audiences is vital for symphony orchestras and opera companies today. The key to success, Yankovskaya believes, is that audiences need to recognize themselves in the music. “We need to offer a richer menu,” she says. “We also need to support the next generation of composers and renew the audience’s curiosity in what an orchestra is. Orchestras kept evolving for a long time, through the middle of the 20th century. The size of the ensembles changed, new instruments, including electronic instruments at mid-century, were being added, and works were written that enhanced those novel orchestral colors. Then in the second half of the last century, we started treating orchestra halls more like museums, and the ensembles themselves became ossified. Now again we have composers, from Mason Bates to many others, who are experimenting with technology and sound and expanding our notion of the orchestra, and that is thrilling for audiences.”
And finally, “we need to tap into our American musical heritage, which is as rich as that of other countries.” Seeing more works by Florence Price and other previously marginalized composers on programs is “wonderful,” just like bringing in “more music of today: jazz, soul, popular music, where there is often real experimentation.”
As a younger woman conductor on the rise, Yankovskaya believes firmly in mentorship and in role models. Her own models are many, but Pierre Boulez and Bernard Haitink, both with CSO ties, figured in heavily. Boulez, the CSO's Regenstein Conductor Emeritus from 2006 until his death in 2016, was “not only a great composer and conductor, but a music entrepreneur who created forums where he fostered the music of others, like the IRCAM in Paris. In many ways, he was actually better at that than promoting his own music.”
And for Haitink, the CSO's principal conductor from 2006 to 2010, with whom Yankovskaya collaborated during his years at the Boston Symphony, it was “all about the music. He did not put himself in the middle; musicians knew that and respected him for it, and he was able to reach very deep and create amazing interpretations.”
As for mentors, she was assistant conductor to Lorin Maazel, and as a recipient of a Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, she worked closely with Marin Alsop (currently chief conductor and curator at the Ravinia Festival). The 20 or so past and current Alsop Fellows stuck together during the pandemic and had regular Zoom calls, often hosted by Alsop, in which they offered each other advice and support. “That’s a fantastic resource,” Yankovskaya says. She hopes to create something similar for other young artists in her field: “We have to share and pass on our knowledge; that’s how we grow.”
As for the coverage of her Chicago concerts in December, in which much was made of the fact that she took the podium a few days after giving birth, she thinks that “in 2022, that should not be so newsworthy. Musicians have full lives like everyone else, and that enriches what we bring to our music-making.”
What does she wish to say to the audiences who will be at her concerts? “To the children: come and enjoy the adventure, take in all the fun visuals [offered by the Magic Circle Mime Company], or close your eyes if you want to be transported only by the music.”
She hopes the parents will join in on the fun: “Children may not have the words yet to express what they feel, but they feel and understand deeply and can teach us to do the same.”
