Kennth Kiesler

Conductor and Mentor of Conductors

Kenneth Kiesler has been Director of Orchestras and Professor of Conducting at the University of Michigan School of Music since 1995. He is Music Director of the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra, founder and director of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak, and Conductor Laureate of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra where, as Music Director from 1980 to 2000, he founded the Illinois Symphony Chorus and Illinois Chamber Orchestra, led debuts at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, and won several awards. He has recently been invited by Pinchas Zukerman to become Director of the Conductors Programme at the National Arts Centre of Canada, where he will succeed Jorma Panula, beginning in summer of 2006.

His students have won major international competitions such as the Maazel/Vilar and Nicolai Malko Competitions, and hold positions with major orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony, and Detroit Symphony, as well as opera companies, and music schools. Kiesler is a member of the visiting artist faculty of the Manhattan School of Music, has led many master classes for the American Symphony Orchestra League, Conductors’ Guild, at Oxford University and London’s Royal Academy of Music.

He was an honored participant in the 1990 Leonard Bernstein American Conductors Program, and conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain in sessions with Pierre Boulez at the Centenary of Carnegie Hall. At the 1986 Stokowski Competition, he was awarded the Silver Medal by Maurice Abravanel, and special recognition for best performance of Appalachian Spring, by Morton Gould. He received the 1988 Helen M. Thompson Award presented by the American Symphony Orchestra League to the outstanding American Music Director under the age of 35.

Kiesler has conducted the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, the Chicago Symphony, the orchestras of Jerusalem, Haifa, Utah, Detroit, New Jersey, Florida, Indianapolis, Memphis, San Diego, Albany, Virginia, Omaha, Fresno, Long Beach, Long Island, Portland, Osaka, Puerto Rico, Daejeon and Pusan in Korea, the New Symphony Orchestra in Bulgaria, Hang Zhou in China, and at the festivals of Meadowbrook, Skaneateles, Sewanee, Breckenridge, and Aspen. His operatic conducting includes Bright Sheng’s The Silver River in Singapore, and Britten's Peter Grimes and Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He has conducted Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham and Cinderella with the Indianapolis Ballet.

Kiesler has conducted several recordings on the Naxos, Equilibrium and Arabesque labels, with the BBC in London, Third Angle, and the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra. He has led premieres by Stucky, Schuller, Bassett, Johnston, Harlap, Frank, Rush and Brantley, and conducted the first performance of Gershwin’s original jazz-band score of Rhapsody in Blue since 1925, the US Premiere of Mendelssohn’s Third Piano Concerto, and the first performance since 1940 of James P. Johnson’s blues opera, De Organizer.

His teachers include Carlo Maria Giulini, Erich Leinsdorf, Fiora Contino, Julius Herford, John Nelson, and James Wimer. He is included in Jeannine Wagar's book, Conductors in Conversation: Fifteen Contemporary Conductors Discuss Their Lives and Profession, and Shostakovich Reconsidered by Allan Ho. Early in his career he was Assistant Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony, Music Director of the South Bend Symphony and Principal Conductor of the Congress of Strings and the Saint Cecilia Orchestra where his “Tribute to Shostakovich” and national broadcasts brought widespread acclaim. He earned the B.M. cum laude, at the University of New Hampshire and the MM at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Johns Hopkins University.