The sad news came last Saturday: the conductor Mikhail Jurowski went away.
Born in Moscow in 1945 in a family where music is transmitted from father to son, Mikhail Jurowksi was the son of the composer Vladimir Jurowksi and the father of the two chiefs Vladimir Jurowski (currently head of the Bayerische Staatsoper) and Dmitri Jurowski. Leaving the conservatory, Mikhail Jurowski became the assistant of the great Russian conductor Guennadi Rozdestvenski in Moscow, as will be his son Vladimir a few years later. Regularly invited to the Komische Oper in Berlin from the end of the 1970s, he left the USSR definitively to settle in Dresden with all his family in 1989. From then on, he collaborated, among other things, with the main German and Scandinavian orchestras, but will regularly return to direct in Saint Petersburg
Very close to Chostakovitch with whom he played 4 hands on the piano as a child, Mikhail Jurowski will logically become one of the composer’s great performers. In 1995, he recorded for the first time his unfinished opera, the players, (following Gogol) as well as all of his vocal symphonic pieces. In 2001, he was nominated 3 times for the Grammys for his direction of works by Rimsky-Korsakov with the orchestra of the RSB. More recently in 2019, he made a remarkable debut in the United States with the Cleveland Orchestra, with a moving interpretation of Shostakovich’s 11th symphony, which has never left him.
The musical career was prestigious but the tribute would not be complete without mentioning the exceptional humanity that emanated from this man and which transpired in all his interpretations: kindness, empathy, generosity. A very great chef has left us but even more so an exceptional man.
