The countertenor Yuriy Mynenko was born in Radomyshl (Ukraine) and studied at the National Music Academy in Odesa. He is a prize-winner of several singing competitions and was the first Ukrainian singer and the first countertenor to reach the final of the prestigious singing competition BBC Cardiff Singer of the Year.
Recent engagements have included Andronico (Tamerlano) at the International Handel Festival in Göttingen, the title role of Giulio Cesare at the Frankfurt Opera and the newly created Baroque pasticcio La Fest at the Stuttgart State Opera. In the 2025/26 season he will appear as Giulio Cesare at the Leipzig Opera, as Medoro in Handel’s Orlando under Marc Minkowski at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and as Tolomeo (Giulio Cesare) on a tour of Europe with Il Pomo d’Oro under Francesco Corti.
Recent highlights have included the title roles in Vivaldi’s Orlando furioso in Ferrara, Modena and at the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival, Cavalli’s Eliogabalo at the Zurich Opera House and Handel’s Ottone at the Handel Festival in Karlsruhe. He has sung Handel’s Rinaldo at Theater Chemnitz, the title role of Pergolesi’s Adriano in Siria at the Theater an der Wien, Lel in Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden at the Paris Opéra, Sesto (La clemenza di Tito) at the Opéra de Lausanne and Romeo in Zingarelli’s Giulietta e Romeo in Rome.
He has also appeared at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the National Theatre in Mannheim, the Cologne Opera, the Kassel State Theatre, the Opéra Royal in Versailles, the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Santa Fe Opera.
Conductors with whom he has collaborated, along with those already named, include Kazem Abdullah, Teodor Currentzis, Alan Curtis, Marc-André Dalbavie, Paul Daniel, Dan Ettinger, Diego Fasolis, Grant Gershon, Reinhard Goebel, Simon Halsey, Roman Kofman, Andris Nelsons, Christopher Moulds, Vasily Petrenko, George Petrou, Mikhail Jurowski and Vladimir Jurowski.
Yuriy Mynenko appeared as Megabise in a multi-award-winning production of Leonardo Vinci’s Artaserse, which was released on CD and DVD.
