Yakov Kreizberg

His brother is Semyon Bychkov (born in 1952).

Yakov began studying piano at age 5.

He attended the Glinka Choir School, where he began composing at age 13.

He subsequently studied conducting with Ilya Musin, as did his brother.

In later years, Kreizberg summarised his conducting education as follows:

"What Musin taught was a foundation; everything else I learned from master classes of very good and bad conductors. From the bad, I learned what not to do."

Yakov Kreizberg (Яков Крейцберг; born Yakov Mayevich Bychkov, 24 October 1959 – 15 March 2011) was a Russian-born American conductor.

Yakov Bychkov was born in Leningrad into a family of Jewish ancestry.

His father, May Bychkov, was a doctor and military scientist.

His maternal great-grandfather, Yakov Kreizberg, was a conductor at the Odessa Opera.

Semyon had emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975.

Yakov had also hoped to emigrate, but his father's professional status and perceived security risk were barriers to emigration.

His emigration became possible only when his father chose to divorce his mother, which permitted mother and son to leave the country.

By that time, he had composed numerous works, all unpublished, in manuscript.

The Soviet authorities, however, did not allow any handwritten material to be taken out of the country, so he had to leave his compositions behind.

The experience was such that he gave up composition and decided to become a conductor, although he also stated later that he "realised I didn't have enough talent for it".

Following his emigration to the United States with his mother in 1976, Yakov Bychkov attended the Mannes School of Music, as did his brother, who counted among his conducting teachers, and graduated in 1981.

One of his first public appearances as conductor was on 30 March 1980 at the Marble Collegiate Church, leading Haydn's Symphony No. 88.

He accompanied and toured with Roberta Peters in the late 1980s.

For his graduation concert, he conducted the Mannes Orchestra on 6 March 1981.

Around this time, he changed his surname to his mother's maiden name, Kreizberg, to distinguish himself from his older brother.

On the advice of Seiji Ozawa, Kreizberg moved to the University of Michigan to do his graduate studies in conducting, where his teachers included Gustav Meier.

Kreizberg also worked as an accompanist to vocal students and accompanied productions such as Theatre Opera Music Institute's 1981 production of Rimsky-Korsakov's Mozart and Salieri.

He took US citizenship in 1982.

He became the first student there to earn a doctorate in both orchestral and operatic conducting, and won the school's Eugene Ormandy Prize.

While at the University of Michigan, Kreizberg conducted the Livonia Youth Symphony's senior orchestra from 1983 to 1984, with performances in Livonia, Michigan, as well as at Orchestra Hall in Detroit.

Kreizberg spent summers at Tanglewood continuing his conducting studies with Erich Leinsdorf, Ozawa, and Leonard Bernstein.

He received a scholarship at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, where he continued work with Bernstein and was invited back to be assistant to Michael Tilson Thomas.

From 1985 to 1988, Kreizberg was director of the orchestra at Mannes, and also taught conducting to a select number of students.

During this period, he also conducted concerts of the New York City Symphony.

In 1986, Kreizberg won first prize in the American Symphony Orchestra's Stokowski Conducting Competition, which resulted in a 2 March 1986 concert at Carnegie Hall, subsequently repeated the following week (9 March) at Newark Symphony Hall.

At the time of his 1986 appointment to the post, he was age 27, the youngest GMD ever appointed in Germany up to that time.

Kreizberg was General Music Director (GMD) of the United Municipal Theaters of Krefeld and Mönchengladbach from 1988 to 1994, where his work included a notable revival of Aribert Reimann's opera-oratorio Troades, which the composer himself received enthusiastically.

Kreizberg later was GMD of the Komische Oper Berlin from 1994 to 2001.

During his tenure there, he conducted 10 new opera productions and 38 orchestral concerts, as well as 2 ballets.

In particular, in 1994, Kreizberg conducted Berthold Goldschmidt's Der gewaltige Hanrei in its first staging since 1932.

Other work there in contemporary opera included a production of Hans Werner Henze's König Hirsch.

For his work at the Komische Oper, he received the Kritikerpreis für Musik in 1997 by the Verband der deutschen Kritiker e.V., the German music critics association.

Later in his career, in 2006, Kreizberg acknowledged Bernstein as the conductor whom he most admired:

"The conductor I most admire and respect is Leonard Bernstein. He had a phenomenal musical talent. Not only was he a great conductor but also a wonderful composer, fabulous pianist, and a powerful educator of young audiences. One could agree or disagree with his approach to a particular score but ultimately he was so unbelievably passionate about music, and so convincing in his reading of the piece, that one couldn't help but feel that his way of interpreting it was the only right way. He even made works that, generally speaking, were not considered the most important seem like masterpieces."