Pathfinders

Symphony Magazine

New York, NY

The current generation of young classical musicians must navigate many of the same hurdles as their predecessors, while facing fewer traditional performance opportunities – but at the same time they can take advantage of 21st-century ways to innovate and experiment. Today’s emerging artists must train to be superb technicians – that’s a given – while also learning how to be activists and entrepreneurs able to forge their own career paths. The passionate and forward-thinking young artists profiled here have distinctive ideas about the ideal classical concert of the future, how to attract more diverse audiences, and how to keep all listeners engaged.

When possible, classical music should be used to advocate for social change, they say. They’re largely optimistic about the future of the genre, yet acutely conscious of the competition from myriad other forms of entertainment, a lack of public education about classical music, and dwindling attention spans. These young artists believe that elements of the concert experience need tweaking to create concerts that offer a welcoming and communal experience relevant to modern audiences. Above all, they are certain that it’s essential to champion the music of our time.

LIDIYA YANKOVSKAYA

“People want to see and hear artistic work that reflects them and their lives and the things around them,” says conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, 33, music director of Chicago Opera Theater and a champion of operatic rarities, contemporary works, and Russian masterpieces. “Audiences are looking for new experiences. Going to a concert or opera is not just about hearing the music. It’s a communal experience that somehow ties into your own world view and life and makes you think about new things in a new way.”

Yankovskaya’s 2019-20 season includes conducting works by Dan Shore, Job Talbot, and David T. Little at Chicago Opera Theater and Ricky Ian Gordon’s Ellen West at the Prototype Festival in New York. She conducts Stravinsky’s Firebird at the Illinois Philharmonic, Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony at the Chicago Philharmonic, and will make her Glimmerglass Festival debut leading Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Yankovskaya took part in the League of American Orchestras’ 2018 Bruno Walter National Conductor Preview, a two-day showcase for conductors on the rise.

Over the next ten years, Yankovskaya believes that new work will take precedence over the warhorses. It’s not about rejecting the standard repertory, she explains, but about embracing the new. She also believes that the classical world will eventually figure out how to best manage mobile devices and other distractions in the concert space. “The attitude now tends to be extreme,” she says. “On one end, it’s ‘please clap and live tweet and film everything.’ On the other end, the conductor will stop the performance if anyone coughs. I think there’s a happy medium.”

Yankovskaya, an alumna of the Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and Marin Alsop’s Taki Concordia Fellowship, hopes that regulations about making recordings will evolve. After all, she points out, it’s important for institutions to create shareable content, but orchestras can’t easily make a 30-second clip for social media. Right now, she says, “Opera companies are better than orchestras at finding ways to create content that audience members want to share.”

Yankovskaya, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and came to America as a refugee, founded the Refugee Orchestra Project in 2016 to highlight the contributions of this country’s immigrants and to advocate for tolerance. The ensemble, which consists of instrumentalists and singers who are themselves refugees or whose family and friends came to the U.S. as refugees, has performed at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, at the Barbican in London, England, and in various venues in New York, Chicago, Boston, and the Washington, D.C. area. “Artists interact with so many different people and cultures,” says Yankovskaya. “I work in major cities and places I might otherwise never have visited. That places artists in an unusual position and it’s our responsibility to share that perspective.”