Artistic Director & Chief Conductor

Born in the Poltava region of Ukraine, Volodymyr Sirenko has been compared by the international press to other brilliant conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle.

His conducting debut took place at the Kyiv Philharmonic Hall in 1983 with works by Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Boulez. In 1989 Sirenko graduated from the Kyiv Conservatoire where he studied conducting under Professor Allin Vlasenko. In 1990, he was a finalist at the International Conducting Competition in Prague. A year later, he was appointed as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestra, a position which he held until 1999. During this period, he made over 300 recordings that are now in the keeping of the Ukrainian Radio and include Mozart Symphonies Nos. 38 and 41, Beethoven Symphony No. 9, Brahms A German Requiem, Rachmaninov Bells, Dvorak Symphonies Nos. 7 and 9.

Since 1999, he has been the Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. Amongst the hundreds of programmes he has performed with the orchestra, highlights include cycles of Mahler’s Complete Symphonies, all four of Bach’s Passions and Mass in B Minor and Lyatoshynsky’s Complete Symphonies. So far he has made 50 recordings and the CD of Silvestrov's Requiem for Larissa was nominated for a Grammy Award in 2005. He has premiered many works by Ukrainian composers over the years including Silvestrov's Symphonies No. 7 and 8, Stankovych's Symphony No. 6.

Sirenko has toured Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, China, Korea, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America.

He has worked with many international orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic and St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestras, Sinfonia Warsovia, NOSPR (Katowice), the Svetlanov Symphony Orchestra, the Bratislava Radio Symphony, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, the National Philharmonic of Russia, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Sirenko has appeared in numerous concert halls around the world, including Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Brucknerhaus (Linz), Barbican Hall and Cadogan Hall (London), Theatre des Champs-Elysees and Opera Comique (Paris), Seoul Art Center, Palau de la Musica in Valencia and Centro Manuel de Falla in Granada, Filharmonia Narodowa (Warsaw), the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory and the Great Hall of St. Petersburg Philharmonia, the Roy Thomson Hall (Toronto), the Tokyo City Opera and the Osaka Symphony Hall, Beijing Concert Hall, Shanghai Oriental Center of Performing Arts.

Volodymyr Sirenko is a People's Artist of Ukraine and laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize, Ukraine’s most prestigious award. He is also Professor of Opera and Symphonic conducting at the National Music Academy of Ukraine.