Lidiya Yankovskaya

Conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya became the sole woman to lead a major American opera company when she was named music director of the Chicago Opera Theater in 2017. Yankovskaya cultivates the difficult specialties of Russian music, rare operas, and contemporary music. Yankovskaya was born on March 26, 1986, in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), in the Soviet Union. She began studies as a ballerina at three but switched to music at five, taking piano lessons and singing in the Children's Chorus of St. Petersburg Radio and Television. Her introduction to opera came when she attended...