The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra has announced that Kirill Karabits will extend his contract as its principal conductor until the end of the 2015/16 season. Following the appointment, Simon Taylor, chief executive of the BSO, said, “it has been obvious from the start that Kirill Karabits and the BSO have a very special chemistry”. Karabits joined the BSO as principal conductor in 2009, the first Ukrainian to hold a titled post with a British orchestra.

Karabits’s appointment as principal came after just two concerts with the orchestra. The conductor recalls, “from the very first moment when I came to conduct BSO it felt special – there was a natural understanding and easiness in making music together”. And it seems that the critics are in agreement. Earlier this year Gramophone praised Karabits’s latest recording of Khachaturian’s ballet music with the BSO for being “full of vibrant life and seductive lyricism”. The forthcoming season sees the BSO continue its complete Beethoven Symphony cycle, alongside plans to record the complete Prokofiev Symphonies for Onyx.