Philipp Chizhevsky

Conductor Philipp Chizhevsky was born in 1984 in Moscow. In 2008 he graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, specialising in choral conducting, under Professor Stanislav Kalinin and in 2010, opera and symphonic conducting under Professor Valery Polyansky. In 2008 he was a prizewinner at The National Russian Conductor Competition.

He was artistic director and conductor of the Gnessin State Music college choir in 2008–2011, where he also taught conducting. He founded his own ensemble, Questa Musica, in 2008, undertaking a number of significant concert projects in Russia and abroad. After receiving a lecturer’s position at Moscow Conservatory in 2011, Chizhevsky became a conductor of the State Academic Symphonic Capella of Russia.

In September 2012 he conducted the premiere performance of the opera Franziskus at the Bolshoi Theatre, written by Sergej Newski, one of Russia’s leading contemporary composers. He also premiered Michael Nyman’s Prologue to Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell with the State Academic Symphony Orchestra in Perm (October 2012).

In 2013 he conducted Questa Musica in a production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale with choreographer Oleg Glushkov. He has been conducting at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, since 2014, where he directed the First Baroque Music Festival during the 2014–15 season. In the same year he undertook a production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Buryat State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre in Ulan-Ude, directed by Hans-Joachim Frey.

In June 2015, with theatre director Boris Yukhananov, he co-created The Drillalians – a six-part opera cycle, regarded as a ground-breaking Opera Series which included world premieres of operas by a plethora of leading contemporary Russian composers: Dmitry Kurlyandsky, Boris Filanovsky, Alexej Syumak, Sergej Nevsky, Alexej Sysoev and Vladimir Rannev.

Chizhevsky has been collaborating with the Tokyo-based Tokyo New City Orchestra since 2016.

In February 2016 he and Questa Musica took part in the Baroque Music Festival in Linz (Austria). Chizhevsky is the artistic director of the II International Orthodox Chant Festival, The Enlightener, on Valaam island on Lake Ladoga. At the same time, he plays a significant role in promoting contemporary music in Russia, performing the Russian premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gruppen in collaboration with conductors Vladimir Yurovsky and Fuad Irbrahimov at Another Space – Moscow’s most significant Contemporary Music Festival.

Chizhevsky has twice been nominated best conductor for the prestigious Golden Mask award in 2013 for the performance of Newsky’s Franziscus and in 2016, for the The Drillalians opera series. He works closely with leading Russian and foreign orchestras, such as the Tokyo New City Orchestra, Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Brandenburgische Staatsorchester, the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra, Russian State Symphony Orchestra, New Opera Theatre Orchestra, the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia, New Russia Symphony Orchestra, Musica Viva Chamber Orchestra amongst others.