Kenneth Kiesler has been Music Director of
the New Hampshire Symphony Orchestra since May of 2002. He has been Director of
Orchestras and Professor of Conducting at the School of
Music of the University of Michigan since 1995. His conducting students have won major international
competitions such as the Maazel/Vilar Competition at Carnegie Hall and
Denmark’s Nicolai Malko Competition, and hold prominent
positions with major symphony orchestras, opera companies
and educational institutions. Kiesler is a member of the
visiting artist faculty of the Manhattan School of Music,
and has led many seminars and master classes at the Royal
Academy of Music in London and at Oxford University.
He is
the founder and director of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak, an intensive program for conductors now in its
tenth year, the subject of a feature article in the April,
2002 Atlantic Monthly and recently the recipient of a
major three-year grant, to support work in personal
development and community leadership, from the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation.
Kiesler holds the position of Conductor Laureate of the
Illinois Symphony Orchestra, after a twenty year tenure as
Music Director from 1980 to 2000. He inspired unprecedented
expansion and artistic development, founded the Illinois
Symphony Chorus, founded the Illinois Chamber Orchestra and
led its debuts at Alice Tully Hall in 1987 and Carnegie Hall
in 1990. 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 Orchestra at the Kennedy
Center, the Chicago Symphony at Orchestra Hall, the Utah,
Detroit, New Jersey, Florida, Indianapolis, Memphis, and San
Diego Symphonies; the orchestras of Albany, Virginia, Omaha,
Fresno, Long Beach, Long Island and Portland, the Texas and
Ohio Chamber Orchestras and the Jerusalem Symphony and the
Haifa Symphony in Israel, the Osaka Philharmonic, the Puerto
Rico Symphony, the New Symphony Orchestra in Sofia,
Bulgaria, the Daejeon Philharmonic and Pusan Symphony in
Korea, the Hang Zhou Symphony in China, and the American
festivals of Meadowbrook, Skaneateles, Sewanee,
Breckenridge, and Aspen.
His extensive operatic conducting
includes ten performances of Bright Sheng’s opera, The
Silver River, at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore, and
over a dozen performances of Britten's Peter Grimes
and Rossini’s Il Turco in Italia at the Opera Theatre
of St. Louis with the St. Louis Symphony. Kiesler has
conducted many dance performances including Copland’s
Appalachian Spring with the Martha Graham Dance Company
and Prokofiev’s Cinderella with the Indianapolis
Ballet.
Kiesler has been recently at work on several recording
projects for the Equilibrium, Naxos and the Arabesque
labels. Recently released on the Equilibrium label:
first-ever recordings of works by William Bolcom, Leslie
Bassett, and Michael Daugherty with the University Symphony
Orchestra. On the Naxos American Classics series, Kiesler
recorded sacred pieces for chorus, orchestra and organ with
the BBC Singers at St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and opera
scenes by Amram, Ellstein, Schiff, and Schoenfield for the
Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. Four of the Naxos
CDs have recently been released. Soon to be released on
Arabesque is David Schiff’s opera based on the story by
Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel the Fool, with Third
Angle, the new-music ensemble of Portland, Oregon.
Kiesler has led premieres by Stephen Stucky, Gunther Schuller,
Leslie Bassett, Ben Johnston, Aharon Harlap, Gabriela Lena
Frank, Steven Rush and Paul Brantley, among others. He has
helped to bring three long-lost works to recent
performance. First, while a student at UNH in 1973, Kiesler
unearthed George Gershwin’s original jazz-band and piano
score of Rhapsody in Blue and, with Ira Gershwin’s approval,
led its first performance since 1925. In 1997, Kiesler
conducted the U.S. Premiere of Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto
No. 3. In 2002, he conducted the first performance since
1940 of the one-act blues opera, De Organizer, by
librettist Langston Hughes and composer James P. Johnson,
and reconstructed by James Dapogny.
He was honored as one of three participants in the Leonard
Bernstein American Conductors Program, was one of four
American conductors selected to conduct the Ensemble
Intercontemporain in sessions with Pierre Boulez as part of
the Carnegie Hall Centenary, and at the 1986 Leopold
Stokowski Competition at Avery Fisher Hall, he was winner of
the Silver Medal, presented by conductor Maurice Abravanel,
and awarded special recognition for best performance of
Appalachian Spring, by composer Morton Gould.
His teachers have included Fiora Contino, Carlo Maria Giulini,
Julius Herford, Erich Leinsdorf, John Nelson, and James
Wimer. A chapter-long interview with Kenneth Kiesler is
included in Jeannine Wagar's book, Conductors in
Conversation: Fifteen Contemporary Conductors Discuss Their
Lives and Profession. Early in his career he was
Assistant Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony and then
became Music Director of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra
and the Congress of Strings. He was Principal Conductor of
New York State's Saint Cecilia Orchestra from 1992 to 1996.
His “Tribute to Shostakovich” and national broadcasts with
the St. Cecilia Orchestra brought widespread acclaim, and
his comments on Shostakovich, from a session with Solomon
Volkov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Maxim Shostakovich, appeared
in the New York Times and in the 1998 book Shostakovich
Reconsidered by Allan Benedict
Ho and Dmitry Feofanov.
Kenneth
Kiesler is a trained wilderness guide and occasionally leads
expeditions in the wilderness areas of Maine. |
