Kirill Karabits

Kirill Karabits (Кири́ло Іва́нович Кара́биць; born 26 December 1976) is a Ukrainian conductor, active in both concert hall and opera house, whose discography mainly includes recordings of Ukrainian, Russian, and other Eastern European music.

Early life
Kirill Karabits' father was the conductor and composer Ivan Karabyts.

Karabits was born in Kyiv (then in the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union). In his youth, Karabits studied piano, musicology and composition developing an interest in conducting at age 13. His early teachers included Tatiana Kozlova. In Kyiv, he studied at the Lysenko Music School, and later at the National Tchaikovsky Music Academy. In 1995, he began studies at the Vienna Musikhochschule and earned a diploma in orchestral conducting after five years of study. He also attended the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, where he was a pupil of Helmuth Rilling and Peter Gülke. He has done scholarly work on the musical archive of the Berliner Singakademie, such as transcribing the 1784 Johannes Passion of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, which was thought to be lost.

Career
Karabits made his first public conducting appearance aged 19. He was assistant conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra from 1998 to 2000. He also served as associate conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France from 2002 to 2005. From 2005 to 2007, Karabits was principal guest conductor of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg.

Karabits made his North American conducting debut with the Houston Symphony Orchestra in March 2009. Karabits first conducted the 'I, CULTURE Orchestra' of Poland in 2013 and became its artistic director in 2014. In November 2014, he made his first guest-conducting appearances with the Staatskapelle Weimar. He first conducted a production at the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar in March 2015. Based on these appearances, in July 2015, the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar named Karabits their next Generalmusikdirector (GMD) and chief conductor, effective with the 2016–2017 season, with an initial contract of 3 years. In June 2018, the DNT and Staatskapelle Weimar announced the scheduled conclusion of Karabits' tenure as GMD of the company in the summer of 2019, following an inability to reach terms on extending his tenure.

In the opera house, his work has included Yevgeny Onegin at Glyndebourne in 2008, his conducting "a highlight of a vintage Glyndebourne evening"., and La Bohème there in 2012. His Ballo in maschera at the Opéra national du Rhin in November 2008 was noted for "excellent, propulsive conducting", and he made his debuts at English National Opera in 2010 in Don Giovanni and the Deutsche Oper Berlin in Boris Godunov in 2017. He conducted the premiere in Paris of Les orages désirés by Gérard Condé in 2003, and his performance of Sardanapalo by Liszt in Weimar, doing "all he can to inject drama, his tempos are natural and properly pliant" was later issued on CD by Audite.

Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
In October 2006, Karabits made his first conducting appearance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO), and returned in October 2007, where both concerts received acclaim. In November 2007, the BSO announced the appointment of Karabits as their 13th Principal Conductor, after a unanimous vote from the orchestra musicians, effective with the 2009–2010 season. The BSO appointment marked Karabits' first chief conductorship. Karabits held the title of Principal Conductor-Designate for the 2008–2009 season, with three concerts. made his first conducting appearance at The Proms with the BSO in August 2009, and formally took up the principal conductor post in October 2009. He was the first Ukrainian conductor to be named principal conductor of a UK orchestra. In August 2011, Karabits and the BSO agreed on a three-year extension of his contract through the 2015–2016 season, and in 2015, the Karabits signed a rolling contract as principal conductor.

He has conducted several premieres with the Bournemouth orchestra including the UK premiere of Magnus Lindberg's Absence, 'Unforged' by Carmen Ho (November 2021), Nurymov Symphony No. 2 (19 January 2022), Ali-Zadeh Nizami Cosmology (April 2022), Akimenko's Cello Concerto (October 2022) and Anna Korsun's Terricone (January 2023). In January 2023, the BSO announced that Karabits would stand down as its chief conductor at the close of the 2023-2024 season, assume the title of conductor laureate, and serve as artistic director of the orchestra's Voices from the East project.

Recordings
With the Staatskapelle Weimar he has recorded Strauss and Liszt. With the BSO, Karabits has recorded music of Rodion Shchedrin for the Naxos label, and music of Aram Khachaturian for the Onyx Classics label. He recorded a complete cycle of the seven Prokofiev symphonies with the BSO on Onyx from 2013 to 2015, which included the symphonic fragment of 1902, the original version of the fourth, and the alternative ending for the seventh. A series of CDs with music by composers from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Ukraine, such as Kara Karayev, Boris Lyatoshynsky, Chary Nurymov and Avet Terterian has appeared on the Chandos label.