Tugan Sokhiev

The Russian conductor Tugan Sokhiev was born in 1977 in Vladikavkaz in North Ossetia. He completed his studies in St. Petersburg and was one of the last students of the legendary Ilya Musin, who also mentored Semyon Bychkov, Valery Gergiev, and Teodor Currentzis. Sokhiev became known in the West when he conducted Puccini’s La Bohème at the Welsh National Opera in 2002. In the following year, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin; he appeared for the first time at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2004 leading Prokofiev’s L’Amour des trois oranges and at Houston Grand Opera in 2006 with Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Sokhiev was appointed head of the Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse in 2008, which he still helms today. From 2012 to 2016, he additionally served as Principal Conductor of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. He has been Music Director of the acclaimed Bolshoi Theater in Moscow since 2014, where in the 2018-19 season he led new productions of Bernstein’s Candide, Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. Sokhiev regularly collaborates as a guest conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic, whose famous Waldbühne summer concert he led in June 2019. He also conducts the Vienna Philharmonic, the Philharmonia and London Symphony Orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, and the Philadelphia and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Sokhiev’s discography encompasses works by Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Mussorgsky. He is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre National du Mérite; he was voted Musical Personality of the Year by the Association of French Music Critics in 2014 and in 2018 was awarded the Russian Order “For Merit to the Fatherland.”

LUCERNE FESTIVAL debut on 9 September 2016, conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in a concert of works by Mendelssohn, Tan Dun, and Tchaikovsky.

July 2019