Maxim Emelyanychev

The son of a trumpeter and a singer, Maxim Emelyanychev was born in 1988 in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. From an early age he sang in a boys’ choir and received piano lessons, but by the time he was 12 he knew that he wanted to be a conductor and made his debut on the podium. He later studied with Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the Moscow Conservatory, while at the same time training on historical keyboard instruments and the cornet. Emelyanychev first became known in the West as an imaginative harpsichordist on the recordings Teodor Currentzis made of the Mozart Da Ponte trilogy. He took over as conductor of Il Pomo d’Oro in 2016, but he does not confine his work to historically informed ensembles. In 2020 he became Principal Conductor with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, which has since extended his contract until 2028. He has conducted the Royal and London Philharmonic Orchestras, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestra Nazionale dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestre de Paris. In the 2022-23 season, he made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in an all-Mozart program; he also made his first appearances with the New Japan Philharmonic, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, Emelyanychev has led Handel’s Rinaldo at the Glyndebourne Festival, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito at the Grand Théâtre de Genève, Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Zurich Opera, and Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House in London. His recording of Handel’s Agrippina as well as the album In War and Peace both received Gramophone Awards, his solo CD of Mozart sonatas won the “Choc de Classica” and the International Classical Music Award, and the project Eden garnered the Opus Klassik. His most recent release, in the spring of 2023, is of Mozart’s first and last symphonies with Il Pomo d’Oro.

July 2023