Full Biography
“The tall, blond, ponytail wizard with a baton.”
-The Guardian, Fiona Maddocks
Maestro Keri-Lynn Wilson’s international conducting career spans over twenty years, leading some of the world’s most prestigious orchestras – such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks – and operas at the world’s top opera houses, including the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Bayerische Staatsoper and the Wiener Staatsoper. Ms. Wilson’s work has been praised as “vividly shaped and nuanced” by The New York Times, and “elegantly incisive” by The Telegraph. Ms. Wilson received a nomination for conductor of the year from the Opus Klassik 2020 awards for her recording of Rossini’s Sigismondo with the Bayerische Rundfunk.
Highlights of Ms. Wilson’s 2023-24 season include her house debut at Opéra national de Paris, conducting Cendrillon, a return to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to conduct La bohème, and Janáček’s Jenůfa with the English National Opera. She will also be conducting the Sinfonieorchester of Theater St. Gallen, the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Society, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in Berlin, and the Orchestre national Bordeaux Aquitaine. In July Ms. Wilson and the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra will tour Europe and the United States.
Keri-Lynn Wilson is the founder and Music Director of the highly regarded Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, which has toured major cities and festivals of Europe and the United States over the past two summers. It was formed in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As a staunch supporter of Ukrainian liberty, Ms. Wilson performed the Verdi Requiem at the Lviv Opera House last February to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the invasion. She returns to Lviv this December to perform the Beethoven Ninth Symphony with a new performance version of the “Ode to Joy” in Ukrainian that she created for the most recent tour of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra.
Recent operatic career highlights include Carmen and La Traviata at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden; Tosca, Madama Butterfly, and La Traviata at the Wiener Staatsoper, La Traviata, Madama Butterfly and Il Barbiere di Siviglia at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and La Traviata at the Opernhaus Zürich, Don Carlo, Iolanta, Manon Lescaut, Tosca and La Traviata at the Bolshoi Theatre, La Fanciulla del West and Aïda at the English National Opera, Rusalka at the Czech National Opera, Rigoletto at the Norwegian National Opera, Der fliegende Holländer, Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov, and Carmen at the Polish National Opera, and Faust at the Washington National Opera. She was the first female conductor to lead an opera at: the Arena di Verona, where she conducted Tosca and Madama Butterfly; the New National Theatre (NNT) Tokyo, where she led Madama Butterfly; and the Opera di Roma, where she conducted Aïda.
On the concert stage, Maestro Wilson has led the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Wiener Kammerorchester, the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, the Prague Philharmonic, the RAI Symphony Orchestra, the Ravinia Festival Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony the Orchestre national d’Ile de France, NDR Radiophilharmonie, Toronto Symphony, and l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal among others.
Of partial Ukrainian descent, Ms. Wilson was raised in Winnipeg, Canada, home of North America’s most concentrated Ukrainian population, where she studied flute, piano, and violin from an early age. While still a student at Juilliard, she assisted Claudio Abbado at the Salzburg Festival, and won a fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center. Upon graduating from Juilliard with a masters both in flute and conducting, she was named the Associate Conductor at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.
© CSAM GmbH, April 2024
