Dane Lam
Chinese-Australian conductor Dane Lam is music director of the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra (assuming the post of music director in July 2023) and principal conductor and artistic director of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra.
In the current season Lam conducts new productions of Carmen for West Australian Opera (directed by Stuart Maunder) and for Scottish Opera (directed by John Fulljames). Future plans include his return to Opera Australia for Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and to the Melbourne and Canberra Symphony Orchestras, La bohème for Hawai‘i Opera Theater, and further concerts with the HSO and XSO.
He was the first conductor in the history of Opera Queensland to be honored with an official position when he was appointed their associate music director and resident conductor in December 2020. During his tenure he conducted productions of Le nozze di Figaro and La traviata, which followed his previous successes at the company with Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and the world premiere of Jonathan Henderson's Dirty Apple. He also led the company in innovative projects in unconventional venues such as the Festival of Outback Opera in regional Queensland and Songs of Love and War in an industrial foundry.
Lam led the orchestral revival in Australia following the initial Covid-lockdown and conducted the first (as well as consecutive) performances in front of live audiences for Opera Queensland, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. He also conducted the Sydney and West Australian Symphony Orchestras in concert, as well as the inaugural production of the National Opera in Canberra, La clemenza di Tito. He was nominated as Artist of the Year by Limelight Magazine in 2021.
Elsewhere, Lam has appeared with Opera Australia (La bohème, Don Giovanni), Scottish Opera (La traviata, The Rake’s Progress), Opera Holland Park (Cilea’s L’arlesiana, Così fan tutte, Il barbiere di Siviglia , Don Giovanni, Aida, Norma, Mascagni’s Iris and Will Todd’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Dunedin, Beijing, Suzhou, Kunming and Shandong Symphony Orchestras, Munich Radio Orchestra, Het Residentie Orkest, City of London Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, Southbank Sinfonia, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Beethoven Orchester Bonn and the Verbier Festival Orchestra.
Under Lam’s artistic direction and stewardship, the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra almost doubled its classical subscription offering and attendance, raising the artistic standard and profile of the orchestra to attract such artists as Jose Carreras, Sumi Jo, Midori Goto, Barry Douglas, Angela Hewitt, Stephen Hough, Ning Feng, Kirill Gerstein, and Yundi Li. As well as a wide-ranging symphonic repertoire and Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler symphony cycles, Lam has conducted Xi’ans first staged performances of Tosca, Le nozze di Figaro and Candide.
Born in Brisbane, Australia to an Australian mother and a Singaporean-Chinese father, Lam played piano, clarinet, and saxophone as a child, and studied conducting under Gwyn Roberts at the University of Queensland. Following an assistantship and three years of study with Gianluigi Gelmetti, then chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony and Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, Lam attained his Masters from The Juilliard School on a full scholarship under James DePreist before undertaking a Junior Fellowship in Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music under Sir Mark Elder, Clark Rundell and Mark Heron. A protégé of the late Kurt Masur, Lam held the post as his assistant conductor at the Orchestre National de France.
Lam is an international ambassador of the Royal Northern College of Music. In 2021, he was appointed an associate lecturer at the University of Queensland, where he has taken the University of Queensland Symphony Orchestra in new and exciting directions within and outside the university community and has been tasked with establishing an elite conducting program.