Waterville Valley Music Center Faculty

KENNETH KIESLER has been Director of Orchestras and Professor of Conducting at the University of Michigan since 1995. As Music Director of the Grammy Award winning University Symphony Orchestra, he has conducted many premieres, major choral-orchestral works, and operas. He just led the orchestra's highly successful tour, ending with an acclaimed performance of Mahler's Fifth Symphony in Carnegie Hall. The current catalogue includes 10 acclaimed CDs Kiesler has recorded with such groups as the BBC Singers and Orchestra (London), Third Angle New Music Ensemble (Portland, OR), and the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra.

Kenneth Kiesler is regarded as one of the world's most sought-after mentors to conductors. His students have won the world's major international competitions such as the Maazel/Vilar and Nicolai Malko Competitions, and they hold positions with major international orchestras, opera companies, and music schools. Since 2006, at the invitation of Music Director Pinchas Zukerman, Kiesler has been Director of the Conductors Programme of Canada's National Arts Centre. In early 2007, he was named Director of the Vendôme Academy of Conducting of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris. He is also the Visiting Artist and Advisor to the orchestras of the Manhattan School of Music, where he conducts several annual concerts. Kiesler has led master classes for the American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL) and Conductors' Guild, Oxford University, Royal Academy of Music in London, Philharmonisches Kammerorchester Berlin and Deutsches Musikrat in Germany.

Kiesler is the founder and director of the Conductors Retreat at Medomak, in Washington, Maine, an intensive and transformative conducting and leadership program for conductors at all career stages, and the subject of a 2002 article in the Atlantic Monthly: "Conducting: A Backwoods Guide."

Kiesler is 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.

Mr. Kiesler is active as a guest conductor at home and abroad. He has conducted the National Symphony, Chicago Symphony, the orchestras of Utah, Detroit, New Jersey, Florida, Indianapolis, Memphis, San Diego, New Hampshire, Long Beach, Long Island, Portland, Jerusalem, Haifa, Osaka, Puerto Rico, Daejeon and Pusan in Korea, the New Symphony Orchestra in Bulgaria, Hang Zhou in China, and at the festivals of Meadowbrook, Breckenridge, Sewanee and Aspen.

His operatic conducting ranges from Bright Sheng's The Silver River in Singapore, to Britten's Peter Grimes and Rossini's Il Turco in Italia at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. His dance performances include Appalachian Spring with Martha Graham and Cinderella with the Indianapolis Ballet.

He has led premieres by Steven Stucky, Gunther Schuller, Leslie Bassett, James P. Johnston, Aharon Harlap, Gabriela Lena Frank, Steve Rush, Robert Sirota, Evan Chambers, and Paul Brantley. At the age of 19, he unearthed and conducted the first performance since 1925 of Gershwin's original jazz-band score of Rhapsody in Blue. With the University Symphony Orchestra, he led the U.S. premiere of Mendelssohn's Third Piano Concerto, world premiere of James P. Johnson's The Dreamy Kid and the first performance since 1940 of Johnson's blues opera, De Organizer. Kiesler's premiere recordings of the Johnson works are soon to be released.

Kiesler was an honored participant in the Leonard Bernstein American Conductors Program, and conducted the Ensemble Intercontemporain in sessions with Pierre Boulez at Carnegie Hall. At the 1986 Stokowski Competition, he was awarded the Silver Medal by Maurice Abravanel, and special recognition by Morton Gould. He received the 1988 Helen M. Thompson Award presented by the ASOL to the nation's outstanding American Music Director under the age of 35.

Kiesler's teachers include Carlo Maria Giulini, Fiora Contino, Julius Herford, Erich Leinsdorf, John Nelson, and James Wimer. He received the MM in Orchestral Conducting with honors from the Peabody Conservatory of Music in 1980.
He began his career as Assistant Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony, where he led annual concerts on the Masterworks, All-Mozart and All-Bach Series, choral, ballet, opera and educational concerts. Also early in his career, Kiesler was Music Director of the South Bend Symphony, and Principal Conductor of the Congress of Strings and the Saint Cecilia Orchestra where his national broadcasts brought widespread acclaim.

Kiesler is included in Jeannine Wagar's book, Conductors in Conversation: Fifteen Contemporary Conductors Discuss Their Lives and Profession, and Shostakovich Reconsidered by Allan Ho