Mikhail Tatarnikov

Mikhail Tatarnikov is a graduate of the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire (Department of Opera and Symphony Conducting). In 2006, he made his debut with the Mariinsky Theatre (the ballet Metaphysics set to Prokofiev’s Second Symphony). Over time, he conducted more than forty titles at the Mariinsky Theatre, 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 has worked with orchestras from Turin, Oslo, Tokyo, Jena, Rotterdam, Gävle, Novosibirsk, and St Petersburg and has served as assistant conductor to Valery Gergiev (Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen) at the Metropolitan Opera. He has conducted at the Comic Opera in Berlin, La Scala in Milan (John Cranko’s ballet Onegin set to music by Tchaikovsky), Bordeaux National Theatre (Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro), Bergen National Opera (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel), Polish National Opera in Warsaw (Berlioz’s Les Troyens), Bavarian State Opera in Munich (Dvořák’s Rusalka), Latvian National Opera in Riga (Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin), Theater an der Wien (Tchaikovsky’s Enchantress), La Monnaie in Brussels (Rachmaninoff’s one-act operas), Berlin State Opera (Puccini’s Manon Lescaut), Bastille Opera in Paris (Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden), Hamburg State Opera (Borodin’s Prince Igor), San Francisco Opera (Janáček’s Vec Makropulos), and Monte Carlo Opera (Prokofiev’s Gambler). Together with Anna Netrebko and Yusif Eyvazov, he performed in Japan, China, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. Mikhail Tatarnikov has also worked with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Neil Shicoff, Vilde Frang, Gautier and Renaud Capuçon, Nikolai Lugansky, Sergei Khachatryan, Peter Donohoe, Kristine Opolais, Vadim Repin, and other renowned soloists.

In 2012–2018, he was the musical director and principal conductor of the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Under the musical directorship of Mikhail Tatarnikov, the Mikhailovsky Theatre released productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Tsar’s Bride, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Verdi’s Il trovatore, Britten’s Billy Budd (Russian première), Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Puccini’s La Bohème, Mozart. The Marriage of Figaro, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella, Multiplicity. Forms of Silence and Emptiness set to music by Johann Sebastian Bach, and The Bronze Idol set to music by Reinhold Glière. At the Theatre, he led concert performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, and Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, Miserly Knight, and Francesca da Rimini.

In 2013, he was awarded the special prize of the St Petersburg Golden Soffit Theatre Award: ‘For Theatrical Expressiveness of Conductor’s Decisions’. In 2016, he was awarded with the Tchaikovsky Prize and a diploma ‘For Contribution into Development of Musical Culture in Russia’.