Since his prodigious breakthrough as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of 19, Ilan Volkov has matured into a versatile conductor who performs with leading orchestras around the world. He enjoys a long-standing relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, having been its principal conductor from 2003 and then principal guest conductor since 2009.
As one of the most open-minded conductors, Ilan Volkov is also a dynamic figurehead on the international contemporary music scene. He launched the Tectonics Festival in 2012, which has since become one of the world’s most diverse and acclaimed celebrations of new music, with festivals in Adelaide, Oslo, New York, Tel Aviv, Kraków, Athens, Glasgow and Reykjavík. In 2020 he co-founded the I & I Foundation with Ilya Gringolts to support the development and performance of new music.
His repertory with a variety of ensembles spreads far and wide and he often appears at the world’s leading music festivals, including Salzburg, Edinburgh, Lucerne, Unsound Kraków, and Berlin, as well as the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s musikprotokoll and the BBC Proms. Between 2011 and 2014 he was music director and principal conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. The 2022/23 season saw the start of Ilan Volkov’s tenure as principal guest conductor with the Brussels Philharmonic.
Equally at home in the opera house, his operatic projects include Eugene Onegin at San Francisco Opera, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Glyndebourne, Peter Grimes at Washington National Opera and Glyndebourne, Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest at the Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic, Bach’s Actus tragicus at the Stuttgart Opera and Olga Neuwirth’s The Outcast in Vienna and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Recently he conducted the world premiere of Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners at the Norwegian National Opera, and Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s new creation L’Apocalypse arabe at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence.
Ilan Volkov’s diverse discography includes Stravinsky’s ballet scores and a Gramophone Award-winning recording of Britten’s complete works for piano and orchestra on the Hyperion label, as well as a critically acclaimed survey of Liszt’s Trois Odes funèbres with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
He also presents podcasts for Radio Halas, in which he explores his extensive musical tastes and interviews various colleagues.
