Mikhail Tatarnikov graduated from the St Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire (Department of Opera and Symphony Conducting).
In 2006, Mikhail Tatarnikov made his debut at the Mariinsky Theatre with the ballet Metaphysics set to Prokofiev’s Second Symphony. At the Mariinsky Theatre, he conducted more than forty titles including Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Tristan und Isolde, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Le nozze di Figaro, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Maid of Pskov and Sadko, and Verdi’s Attila. He was an assistant conductor to Valery Gergiev on the production of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Metropolitan Opera. Since 2020, he has been the artistic director of the Valrose International Music Festival and San Marino Musical Festival. He was a musical conductor of the Russian première of Britten’s Billy Budd at the Mikhailovsky Theatre, Rubinstein’s Demon at the Liceu Opera, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Berlin State Opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden at the Paris Opera, Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah at the Champs-Élysée Theatre, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Prokofiev’s Gambler at the Monte-Carlo Opera, Borodin’s Prince Igor at the Hamburg State Opera, and Janáček’s Vec Makropulos at the San Francisco Opera, among others. He has appeared at La Scala, Bordeaux National Theatre, Bavarian State Opera, Berlin Comic Opera, Bergen National Opera, Theater an der Wien, Warsaw National Opera, Latvian National Opera, and La Monnaie, among others. As a symphonic conductor, he has collaborated with the national orchestras of France, Denmark, Latvia, and Scotland, philharmonic orchestras of Rotterdam, Monte-Carlo, Oslo, Seoul, orchestras of the Polish Radio and French Radio, sym-phonic orchestras of Birmingham, Bournemouth, Tokyo, Seattle, as well as with the Russian National Philharmonic Orchestra, Novosibirsk Philharmonic Orchestra, and Russian National Orchestra. He has collaborated with Dmitri Tcherniakov, Jürgen Flimm, Dmitri Bertman, and other directors, as well as with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Roberto Alagna, Kristīne Opolais, Aida Garifullina, Ildar Abdrazakov, Neil Shicoff, Gautier and Renaud Capuçon, Vadim Repin, Nikolay Lugansky, Peter O’Donoghue, Anna Netrebko, Yusif Eyvazov, and other singers. In August 2020, he performed at the 100th Salzburg Festival.
In 2012–2018, he was a musical director of the Mikhailovsky Theatre, where he presented many prem-ieres, symphonic concerts, and concert performances of operas. With the Mikhailovsky Orchestra, he toured to Japan.