Vladimir Jurowski

It is rare that a conductor achieves international acclaim within a few years of his debut, but such was the case with Vladimir Jurowski, whose star is still on the ascent. When he made his debut in 1995 at the Wexford Festival in Ireland with Rimsky-Korsakov's May Night, he was only 23. That success led to his debut at Covent Garden later that season in Verdi's Nabucco. His first operatic recording appeared on Marco Polo in 1997, an acclaimed three-CD set containing Meyerbeer's rarely encountered L'étoile du nord, derived from live performances at the 1996 Wexford Festival. Jurowski is also well known in the concert hall: as the principal guest conductor of both the London Philharmonic and Russian National Orchestra, he regularly leads concerts in a variety of repertory, though he has thus far tended to favor Russian composers, particularly Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and Rachmaninov. Jurowski has amassed a considerable discography on a clutch of labels, including PentaTone, Marco Polo, Capriccio, ECM, and RCA.

Vladimir Jurowski was born in Moscow on April 4, 1972. His father is famed conductor Michail Jurowski. Vladimir's first serious music studies were in his teens at the Moscow Conservatory. The Jurowski family moved to Germany in 1990, where young Vladimir studied conducting with Rolf Reuter.

Jurowski made his first recording, Kancheli's cantata Exil, in 1994 (ECM Records) even before his official debut the following year. After his appearances at the Wexford Festival and Covent Garden he began conducting at the Komische Oper Berlin, where he worked as an assistant to Yakov Kreizberg during the 1996-1997 season. The following year he was appointed kapellmeister there.

Meanwhile, Jurowski continued making recordings, among the more prominent of which was a widely acclaimed account of Massenet's Werther on RCA with Ramón Vargas and Vesselina Kasarova.

Jurowski left his Berlin post in 2001, the year he assumed music directorship of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera. He was already busy (since 2000) as principal guest conductor of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, a post he held for three seasons.

In 2003 Jurowski was appointed principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and two years later began serving in the same capacity with the Russian National Orchestra. Among his recordings is the 2007 CD on PentaTone Classics of the Prokofiev Fifth Symphony and Ode to the End of the War with the Russian National Orchestra.