Ken Lam - Biography

Ken is Assistant Conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Youth Orchestra.

He was a featured conductor in the 2009 Bruno Walter National Conductors Preview with the Nashville Symphony and is staff conductor of the Brevard Music Center in North Carolina where he will make his opera debut this summer with Die Fledermaus.

Ken made his debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra this season and made his US professional debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in June 2008 as one of four conductors selected by Leonard Slatkin.

In addition to assisting Music Director Paavo Jarvi at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, he has served as assistant/cover conductor for Sir Roger Norrington, Raphael Frubeck de Burgos, Lorin Maazel (in two productions of Britten operas), Gunther Herbig (Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) and Christopher Seaman (St Louis Symphony Orchestra) and is assistant/cover conductor for Cincinnati Opera's production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg this June.

In his native Hong Kong, he 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 and was Director of the Choral Program at the University of Hong Kong for three years before leaving Hong Kong to study in the US in 2005. He was also the founding Principal Conductor of the Hong Kong Melody Makers, a youth choir organized and funded by the Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups.

Hong Kong Voices, after the first Hong Kong performance of the London version of Brahms' Requiem.

He graduated from Peabody Conservatory with a master degree and graduate diploma in conducting. His teachers at Peabody are Gustav Meier, Markand Thakar and Marin Alsop and he was the choral graduate assistant under Edward Polochick for two years and opera conducting assistant for two productions. He also studied with David Zinman at the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen for three summers (2006-2008) and was nominated for the Aspen/Glimmerglass Opera Prize.

He sang professionally as a tenor with the Concert Artists of Baltimore and was a freelance violinist in Hong Kong. He studied economics at St. John's College, Cambridge University and was a practicing solicitor specializing in asset finance for ten years with the international law firm Clifford Chance and was a director and manager at the classical label Naxos.

He is also a keen golfer and tennis player and was a past president of the Cambridge University Chinese Socihety.

October 2009