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 major orchestras around the world and receives regular invitations to appear at the world’s leading music festivals, including the BBC Proms, the Edinburgh Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Unsound Festival in Kraków, the Musikfest Berlin, the musikprotokoll at the steirischer herbst and the Salzburg Festival.
He enjoys a long-standing relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, having been its principal conductor from 2003 and its principal guest conductor from 2009 to 2024; he is currently its creative partner. In addition, between 2011 and 2014 he was music director and principal conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and since 2022/23 he has been principal guest conductor with the Brussels Philharmonic.
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 acclaimed celebrations of new music, with editions 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.
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 in Washington, Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest with the New York Philharmonic, Bach’s Actus tragicus at the Stuttgart State Opera, Olga Neuwirth’s The Outcast in Vienna and at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence at the Zurich Opera House, and the world premieres of Missy Mazzoli’s The Listeners at the Norwegian National Opera, and Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s 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 recording of Liszt’s Trois Odes funèbres with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
