Ken Lam to Join the CSO Conducting Staff

CINCINNATI—The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra announced today that Ken Lam will join the CSO conducting staff as an assistant conductor starting in August of 2008.  This position was vacated by Tito Muñoz at the end of the 2006-2007 season.  Mr. Lam’s duties will include assisting CSO Music Director Paavo Järvi, the conductors of the Cincinnati Pops and May Festival, guest conductors as needed, as well as conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra.

“I’ve very excited about coming to Cincinnati,” said Mr. Lam.  “I have admired the work of Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra through their recordings for quite some time.  I can’t wait to start work with the CSO.”

Mr. Lam, 37, first dreamed of becoming a conductor at the age of seven, but his early career took him down a different path.  He graduated from Epson College in England and went on to get his masters in economics at the University of Cambridge.  He worked for 10 years as a lawyer in London and Hong Kong, specializing in asset finance.  Despite this successful legal career, he remained active in music and still dreamed of being a full-time conductor.

In the fall of 2005, he enrolled in the Peabody Conservatory of Music at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studying with Gustav Meier and Markand Thakar.  He is currently a doctoral candidate and a graduate assistant at Peabody.

In his native Hong Kong, Mr. Lam has been Artistic Director of the chamber choir Hong Kong Voices since 2001. He has also been Principal Conductor of the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra.

Recent conducting highlights include being Assistant/Cover Conductor for Lorin Maazel (Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia) and Gunther Herbig (Baltimore Symphony Orchestra). Mr. Lam has also been invited by Leonard Slatkin to participate in the National Conducting Institute in 2007 and 2008 and will conduct the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center this June. He attended the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen both in 2006 and 2007 (and was nominated by David Zinman and Murry Sidlin for the Aspen/Glimmerglass Opera Prize last summer) and will spend a third summer at Aspen this June.