Kirill Karabits

Kirill Karabits grew up in Kyiv — his father was the composer and conductor Ivan Karabits — and continued his studies in Vienna. As Chief Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra from 2009 to 2024, the first Ukrainian to lead a British orchestra, Karabits made Proms appearances, recordings of Prokofiev and Khachaturian, and his series Voices from the East, which put symphonic music of Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia in front of British audiences. He was General Music Director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar from 2016 to 2019, where he revived Liszt rarities including the reconstructed first act of Sardanapalo, and in 2024 was appointed an honorary OBE for services to music. In August and September 2025 he sat on the jury of the International Ferenc Fricsay Conducting Competition in Szeged. He came through the Lysenko school in Kyiv and the Tchaikovsky Academy, where Roman Kofman taught him, and worked with Helmuth Rilling at the Bach Academy in Stuttgart; he has also been principal guest conductor in Strasbourg and held associate posts with the Radio France and Budapest Festival orchestras. Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades and Janacek's The Excursions of Mr Broucek are among his operas, and the manuscript work runs beside the conducting, from a transcription of C. P. E. Bach's Johannes-Passion of 1784 to the recovery of Telemann's Pastorelle en Musique. From October 2024 he became the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate and Artistic Director of Voices from the East.