Dmitry Ralko graduated from the St Petersburg State Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire having specialised in choral and opera and symphony conducting. In 1996 he was appointed Principal Chorus Master and Conductor of the Ensemble of Song and Dance of the Leningrad Military District. With this ensemble he gave over three hundred performances in addition to appearances in France, Spain and Finland. In 2003 he was made a conductor at the St Petersburg Conservatoire Theatre of Opera and Ballet where he conducted Mozart’s operas Cosi fan tutte and Le nozze di Figaro, Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Puccini’s La Bohйme, Verdi’s La traviata, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and a series of children’s performances and opera music galas.
From 2004 to 2006 he was a conductor of the St Petersburg State Cappella Symphony Orchestra. He has also worked with the Chelyabinsk Opera and Ballet Theatre (Le nozze di Figaro) and the Concert Chamber Orchestra of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. From 2007 to 2009 he was Principal Conductor of the Full Student Symphony Orchestra of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Has taught opera at the vocal faculty of the Conservatoire.
From 2007 to the present he has been Artistic Director and Conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of the Rimsky-Korsakov Music College. In 2011 using this orchestra and the college’s faculty of vocal studies he established the student opera theatre-studio Mozarteum Theatre with which he has staged productions of the operas Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and La serva padrona by Pergolesi.
Since 2007 he has been the Children’s Chorus Master at the Mariinsky Theatre. Under his baton, the Children’s Chorus has taken part in many of the theatre’s projects including premieres of the operas The Brothers Karamazov, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Attila, Le nozze di Figaro (production by Alexander Petrov) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, George Balanchine’s Ballet A Midsummer Night’s Dream, performances of the cantata Carmina Burana, Mahler’s Third and Eighth Symphonies, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and a recording of the opera Parsifal on the Mariinsky label.