Oksana Lyniv

Oksana Lyniv is a conductor with a dazzling international career, and an artist dedicated to the development of the classical music scene in her native Ukraine. She is the first woman to have conducted at the Bayreuth Festival. In 2016 she founded the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, with whom she appeared in 2022 at the prestigious festival in Lucerne.

When Oksana Lyniv opened the Bayreuth Festival in 2021 with a performance of The Flying Dutchman, she was hailed as the first female conductor ever to appear at the festival. When she assumed the post of Music Director of Teatro Comunale in Bologna the following year, she became the first female conductor to stand at the helm of an Italian opera house. “Oksana Lyniv is a power woman,” stated Deutsche Welle television. “As a maestra she has already made it to the top as an orchestral chief in what is still a male-dominated world.” Oksana Lyniv’s career was launched when she won third place at the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition in Bamberg in 2004. She then worked at the opera house in Odessa and was assistant conductor to Kirill Petrenko at the Bavarian State Opera, conducting a series of productions there herself as well.

Highlights of her current season include a new production of Cherubini’s Médée, directed by Andrea Breth at the Berlin State Opera, Puccini’s Tosca at the Los Angeles Opera, marking her American debut, and a performance at Oper Graz, where she was General Music Director in the years 2017 to 2020. Equally important as her international career are the projects established in her native Ukraine. Lyniv is the founder and conductor of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine and she also set up the LvivMozArt Festival in Lviv in Western Ukraine.

She is particularly fond of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and will appear at the Prague Spring with his Symphony No. 38, known as the “Prague Symphony”. The concert will begin with a performance from young soprano Yuliya Tkachenko, whom Lyniv invited to give the world premiere of a new work set to texts by a living classic of Ukrainian poetry, Lina Kostenko; the piece was written by Eduard Resatsch, a composer and cellist from Lviv who plays in the Bamberg Symphony under Chief Conductor Jakub Hrůša.

The evening in the Dvořák Hall will also see the return of the winners of last year’s Prague Spring International Music Competition, who will together perform Strauss’s Duett-Concertino for clarinet, bassoon and chamber orchestra, a poetic, late work filled with wonderful melodies and inspired by the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast.