Damir Zakirov graduated cum laude from the Kazan Conservatoire in 2010. When a student, he performed Ernesto in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, the Child in Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Siébel in Gounod’s Faust, Yavtukh in Anisimova’s Viy, and Pedrillo in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In 2010–2011, he was a soloist with the Musa Cälil Theatre in Kazan and with the Sapaev Mari Theatre in Yoshkar-Ola. Since 2012, he has been a soloist with the St Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatoire Theatre. Since 2013, he has been a guest soloist with the Zazerkalie Theatre in St Petersburg. Since 2014, he has been a guest soloist with the Komi Theatre. With governmental delegations of Tatarstan, he has toured to Brussels, London, Bangkok, Istanbul, Baku, and Moscow. Zakirov’s repertoire includes: Almaviva in Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto, Alfred in Verdi’s La traviata, Lensky in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Ferrando in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, Vaudémont in Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, Berendey in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden, the Young Gypsy in Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, Vladimir in Borodin’s Prince Igor, Elisey in Pleshak’s Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights, Beppo in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, the Yurodivy in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, Prince Alexis in Giordano’s Siberia, and the tenor parts in Mozart’s Requiem and masses by Mozart and Saint-Saëns.
In 2015–2017, Damir Zakirov was a guest soloist with the Mikhailovsky Opera. Since 2017, he has been a soloist with the Mikhailovsky Opera. Here he appeared in Puccini’s La Bohème staged by Robert Carsen and participated in concert performances of Rachmaninoff’s Miserly Knight and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Snow Maiden. Nowadays, at the Theatre, he performs tenor parts in operas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Giuseppe Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Antonín Dvořák, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.