Second Homes: Lidiya Yankovskaya speaks up for 'second' companies

Opera Magazine

London, UK

“It's a beautiful opportunity,” says Lidiya Yankovskaya. “A month of rehearsal, where the director, the singer and I get to think every day about every nuance of that emotional dramatic arc over the course of the piece. That is a luxury.” Speaking over Zoom during a rare day off between concerts in Detroit and Knoxville, the Russian-American conductor is palpably excited about her upcoming appearances at English National Opera. The music director of Chicago Opera Theater since 2017, Yankovskaya has a string of recent North American debuts to her name, including with the Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Houston Grand Opera. But this will be her first trip to the UK since before the pandemic, when her Refugee Orchestra Project performed at ISO St Luke's in 2019.

Fittingly for an artist who has championed experimental and contemporary works throughout her career, what's bringing her back across the Atlantic is a somewhat unconventional ENO debut: Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 3, a work written for the concert hall rather than the opera house, and featuring just a single vocal soloist. Better known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Górecki's setting of three meditative texts has been an audience favourite since the early 1990s, when a recording featuring Dawn Upshaw became an unlikely chart-topper; but, with the exception of Crystal Pite's Light of Passage (coincidentally premiered in London by the Royal Ballet in 2022), it has rarely been approached as a stage work.

Yankovskaya relishes the scope for interpretation. “It's such an exciting and powerful opportunity, because of course with concert performances, one of the problems is that you never have that much rehearsal time. You just have a few days to put it together. And this is a piece that has so many emotional layers. So having an opportunity to really explore those over the course of an entire staging process, it's really exciting.”