‘there’s no point pushing to find the right orchestra. it’s like a relationship and needs to happen naturally’

Kirill Karabits

Back in the late 2000s, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) was on the lookout for a new chief conductor to follow in the footsteps of Marin Alsop. A young Ukrainian had made an impression on the band, so they invited him back for a tour to test his mettle. But Kirill Karabits’s schedule was tight: he’d have to hot-foot it from a concert in São Paulo, Brazil, to Poole overnight. Things didn’t quite go to plan. Before his flight, he was eating with some Ukrainian acquaintances. ‘And they gave me fresh peanuts, which I’d never had before. Twenty minutes later, my face was unrecognisable,’ he says. Undeterred and not so unwell he couldn’t fly, he hopped on the plane and put in his earplugs to get a good kip. But thanks to his swollen face, one of them became stuck. ‘And so, I had to go to hospital in Poole to take it out. All before the first rehearsal. It was an unusual start. But it went well, and I thought, if I can survive this and still finish the week, something special could happen. Life was throwing me a test.’

Karabits got the job. And he was right – something special did happen. He took up the BSO reins in 2009 and it went so well that he’s been there ever since. In 2024, after 15 years together, Karabits will give his last Bournemouth show. It’s been a busy time: he reckons that so far, he’s conducted nearly 400 concerts with the BSO, which takes programmes on tour around the south and southwest of England. ‘I’m there a minimum of nine weeks a year, so in ten years that’s 90 different programmes,’ he tells me over a coffee in the BSO’s home base at The Lighthouse in Poole, a day after the orchestra’s 2022-23 season finale (this afternoon he will be heading off to The Grange Festival in Hampshire to rehearse Mozart’s Così fan tutte). ‘And we’ve hardly repeated anything.’

If he finds it hard to pick out highlights (‘many, many concerts’, he replies), then the critics can do it for him. How about his ‘Voices from the East’ series, highlighting composers from eastern Europe and central Asia? Or the recorded cycle of Prokofiev symphonies (on the Onyx label), described as ‘ut