Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya: ‘People’s nature is to blame the largest minority’

Financial Times

London, UK

The music of different cultures has always been part of her life. Although Yankovskaya says she was not fully exposed to Jewish music until she arrived in the US, Russian folk music was pervasive in her early years and she quickly came to understand how its roots were embedded in classical composers such as Stravinsky. “To this day I have a memory of seeing a puppet version of Petrushka when I was very small and the music always felt to me like folk music, because that’s really what it is. You get the same feeling if someone analyses traditional classic jazz, which looks dissonant on the page, but it is a kind of music that is ingrained in you.”

Drawing these strands together leads to Yankovskaya’s commitment to new music. Although she has now stepped down as music director of Chicago Opera Theater, she continues to oversee the company’s Vanguard Initiative, which has premiered successful operas such as Quamino’s Map by Errollyn Wallen and The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing by Justine F Chen.

“We need to create an environment where we can initiate art that speaks for today. At some point in the last century we forgot this in the classical music world and a museum mentality started to set in. Great composers of the past, like Mozart and Verdi, had many opportunities to experiment and fail, which today’s composers rarely have. The programme I run at Chicago Opera Theater offers a two-year residency to enable them to be prepared as far as possible for that big commission when it comes, and we should do that in the symphony world too. Supporting living creators: this has been one of my passions from the very start of my career.”