Symphony Orchestra of the Tchaikovsky Music Academy Kiev

The Ukrainian conductor Igor Palkin was born into a family of musicians in Kharkiv in 1959. From 1978 to 1984 he studied choral conducting, piano and conducting at the State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Kiev, where Roman Kofman was among his teachers. After this he began his career as a conductor, which also took him to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1989. Apart from the Ukraine’s leading orchestras, Palkin has been invited to guest-conduct orchestras in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Spain and other European countries. His opera includes even rarities such as Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, Prokofiev’s Duenna, Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan as well as Love Letters and Solitude by the Ukrainian composer Vitaly Gubarenko. Palkin is currently conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Ukrainian National Philharmonic and chief conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the National Tchaikovsky Music Academy in Kiev.

Even before his sixth birthday, Dima Tkachenko, a native of the Ukraine, began taking violin lessons. After graduating from the Lysenko Music School in Kiev and the National Music Academy of the Ukraine, he was invited to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London in 1998. Afterwards, he launched an international career which has taken him all over Europe, Asia and America. Among its highlights were performances at the Great Concert Hall in Moscow, at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the Palau de la Música in Barcelona and Carnegie Hall in New York. Tkachenko’s repertoire includes all the great violin concerti, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Mozart and Mendelssohn and all the way to Berg, Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Lutoslawski. Tkachenko teaches at the Ukraine’s National Music Academy, gives master classes and serves on the juries of various international competitions. He is also the co-founder and artistic director of the International Benjamin Britten Violin Competition in London.

www.tkachenko.net