Iurii Iushkevich

The young countertenor Iurii Iushkevich was born in St Petersburg in 1997 and is a prize-winner of numerous international singing competitions. He has appeared at prestigious opera houses and concert halls such as the Vienna State Opera, the Leipzig Opera, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Berlin Philharmonie, the St Petersburg Philharmonic, the Moscow Philharmonic and the Main Auditorium of the Moscow Conservatory. His repertory spans from Baroque works to contemporary compositions.

As a participant in the Young Singers Project, Iurii Iushkevich sang the roles of Hippogryph and Astolfo in Marius Felix Lange’s children’s opera Der Gesang der Zauberinsel at the 2019 Salzburg Festival. In 2022 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera as Shepherd in Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo and took on the lead role of Ich in the world premiere of Johannes Kalitzke’s Kapitän Nemos Bibliothek in a co-production of the Bregenz and Schwetzingen SWR Festivals. A recording of this opera with Ensemble Modern was released in December 2024. In 2023/24 he made his debuts as Lel in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow-Maiden at the Tyrolean Festival Erl and as Nireno in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto at the Frankfurt Opera.

Highlights of the 2024/25 season include(d) his return as Nireno and his role debut as Queen’s Servant in Aribert Reimann’s L’Invisible at the Frankfurt Opera. He also appears as Arbate in Mozart’s Mitridate, re di Ponto at the Salzburg Festival.

As a bursary-holder of the Lyra Foundation in Zurich, he performed as a soloist in 2018 in concerts with the Bayerische Philharmonie at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, at the Theater im Kurhaus in Freudenstadt and at the Cathedral Concerts St Blasien in Baden-Württemberg.

Iurii Iushkevich studied with Enrico Facini at the Berlin University of the Arts and at the University of the Arts in Graz with Elena Pankratova. He won first prize at the Elena Obraztsova Competition for Young Opera Singers in St Petersburg in 2012. In 2014 he won a prize at the ‘Crescendo’ International Music Competition in New York, and in 2019 he won the International Music Competition Triomphe de l’Art in Brussels.