In recent seasons, he made débuts with the London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and Budapest Festival Orchestras, Orchestre National de France, Finnish Radio Symphony, NHK Symphony Tokyo, Sydney Symphony and Accademia di Santa Cecilia, and toured with the European Union Youth Orchestra. In the US he has made successful débuts with many top level orchestras, including the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, Boston Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, Dallas, Baltimore and St Louis Symphony Orchestras.

Future highlights include tour periods in Europe and the US with the Russian National and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras, return visits to the Philharmonia, Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Symphony, and débuts with the Czech Philharmonic, Vienna Symphony, Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Chicago Symphony and National Symphony Washington.

His wide operatic repertoire includes Macbeth (Glyndebourne Festival Opera), Eugene Onegin (Opera de Paris), Le Villi, I due Foscari and Boris Godounov (Netherlands Reisopera) and Pique Dame (Hamburg State Opera) and future plans include his débuts at the Zurich Opera (Carmen).

Recordings with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic include a rare double bill of Fleishman’s Rothschild’s Violin and Shostakovich’s The Gamblers, Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, and recordings for Naxos of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony (winner of the 2009 Gramophone Award for Best Orchestral Recording) and the first discs of an ongoing Shostakovich cycle (Symphonies 5, 8, 9, 10 and 11).

In 2007 Vasily Petrenko was named Young Artist of the Year at the annual Gramophone Awards, and in 2009 he was awarded Honorary Doctorates by both the University of Liverpool and Liverpool Hope University, in recognition of the immense impact he has had on the city’s cultural scene.