Semyon, we are doing this interview for your 70th birthday. Do you see that as a milestone? Or as a chance for retrospection? I already noticed a few decades ago that birthdays that end with a zero don’t mean anything. Life afterwards is just as it was before, and the...
“Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy, Mussorgsky and Pushkin, Shostakovich and Akhmatova, among countless others, have given us gifts through their immortal creations. Are we to refuse them now solely because of their Russian origins?” Semyon Bychkov was invited by The Economist...
Last autumn, Russian presenter Irina Nikitina travelled to Berlin where Semyon was conducting to speak to him about his life and career. The interview – as part of TV Kultura’s Enigma Program series – was broadcast in Russia on Thursday 10 February and is available to...
Semyon Bychkov spoke with Reportér magazine’s Adéla Dražanová for an in depth interview about his life to date: from growing up in Leningrad and studying at the Glinka Choral School in the 1960’s; emigrating to the USA via Vienna; and how he came to be the Czech...
Semyon Bychkov: “Perfection depends on what you are looking for” Lockdown has made the conductor addicted to Beethoven and a tour of northern Spain is planned Jesús Ruiz Mantilla Only conducting music that he can’t live without. Lockdown has made him addicted to...
Spotlight – Listen – Review ‘The music of Brahms is always intimate, no matter how loudly it’s talking,’ says Semyon Bychkov. ‘For me, this is the great paradox: the monumentality of Brahms is in its intimacy. There is an interesting letter that he wrote in 1886 to...
