Alexander Vedernikov will join the Royal Danish Opera as Chief Conductor Designate in the season 17/18, taking the role of Chief Conductor from September 2018. Currently Chief Conductor of the Odense Symphony Orchestra in Denmark, Alexander has brought this orchestra to a new level of international recognition and is currently working on a three-year project to perform Wagner’s Ring Cycle in concert.
Alexander Vedernikov was Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Bolshoi Theatre from 2001 until 2009 and has been credited with rebuilding the Bolshoi Theatre’s historical reputation for artistic excellence, conducting Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina and Boris Godunov (a new production in the original Mussorgsky orchestration), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Puccini’s Turandot, Prokofiev’s Cinderella, War and Peace and The Fiery Angel, Leonid Desyatnikov’s The Children of Rosenthal (world premiere, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre), Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla, and Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur. Under his direction, the orchestra of the Bolshoi toured extensively, including a season of opera and ballet at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2006 (including The Fiery Angel and Boris Godunov), where the orchestra in particular was singled out for its exceptional playing. Opera and symphonic performances at La Scala were equally successful.
As a guest conductor, Vedernikov works regularly with Orchestre de Paris, NHK Symphony, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Netherlands Philharmonic, Orchestra Verdi Milan, London Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Gothenburg Symphony, Danish National Symphony, Bergen Philharmonic and the Czech Philharmonic. He has worked extensively with the BBC Symphony Orchestra to perform a broad range of repertoire, including Prokfiev’s 3rd Symphony at the Proms, a newly created version of Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn by Detlev Glanert with Dietrich Henschel and works from Haydn and Brahms to Schinttke, Tippett and John Adams. He has also conducted the Sydney Symphony, Bayerischer Rundfunk, China Philharmonic, Staatskapelle Dresden, Montreal Symphony, RTE Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC.
In the field of opera, Alexander Vedernikov has frequently conducted at Berlin’s Komische Oper, and has worked throughout Italy at La Scala in Milan, La Fenice in Venice, Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Teatro Regio in Turin and Opera di Roma. He has conducted productions at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bastille Opera in Paris, the Finnish National Opera, Zurich Opera, Frankfurt Opera and Royal Stockholm Opera as well as the Danish National Opera.
Alexander completed his musical studies at the Moscow Conservatory in 1990 and from 1988-90, he worked at Moscow’s Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre. From 1988-95, he was assistant to the chief conductor and second conductor of the Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra (formerly Gosteleradio’s Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra), whom he accompanied on many tours in Russia, Austria, Germany, Greece, Turkey and Great Britain. In 1995, he founded the Russian Philharmonia Symphony Orchestra and was Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of this orchestra until 2004. He has conducted Russia’s State Symphony Orchestra and the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the St Petersburg Philharmonic. Sinc’ 2003, he has been a member of the conductors’ collegium of the Russian National Orchestra, with whom he has toured in France, Germany and the United States. In January 2004, as part of the Russian National Orchestra’s tour of nine cities, Alexander Vedernikov made his debut at Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Centre, Washington.
Russia’s great institutions of music and t tre and their distinctive traditions have played a decisive role in shaping Alexander Vedernikov’s artistry father, also named Alexander, was famed throughout the Soviet Union and beyond for his interpretations of in many ways. The conductor, born in Moscow on 11 January 1964, was raised in a musical family. His such roles as dunov and Kutuzov in Prokofiev’s War and Peace; his mother, Natalia Gureyeva was a professor of organ at the MoBoris Goscow Conservatory. His deep commitment to Russian repertoire reaches far beyond the central range of romantic and 20th-century masterworks by Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. He is a tireless champion of the work of Georgy Sviridov, Mieczysław Weinberg and Boris Tchaikovsky and has also cast fresh interpretive light on substantial compositions by Taneyev and Glinka.