Keri-Lynn Wilson

Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who was born in 1967 into a Canadian-Ukrainian family of musicians, began studying flute, violin, and piano at an early age; by her teenage years, she was already appearing as a flute soloist with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra and the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. She studied flute with Julius Baker and conducting with Otto-Werner Mueller at the Juilliard School in New York. Early formative experiences included serving as an assistant to Claudio Abbado at the Salzburg Festival and receiving a fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center. Wilson launched her professional career in 1994 as Associate Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, leading to a wide-ranging career on both the concert stage and in the opera house. Wilson has conducted the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonics, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. In 2025, she made her debut with the MDR Symphony Orchestra at the Bach Festival in Leipzig. Her operatic credits include Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House in London, Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly at the Vienna Staatsoper, Dvořák’s Rusalka at the Czech National Opera in Prague, and Verdi’s La traviata at the Bavarian Staatsoper. In the 2025-26 season, she will guest conduct Puccini’s La Bohème at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Carmen at the Opéra national de Paris, and Madama Butterfly at the Staatsoper Berlin. Wilson is Co-Founder and Music Director of the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, with which she gave the first-ever performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Ukrainian in 2024. For this she was awarded the Order of Princess Olga by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since 2024, she has also served as Music Director of the Kyiv Camerata, leading the ensemble in a program of four Ukrainian composers at the Berlin Philharmonie in the spring of 2025.

Keri-Lynn Wilson has been a guest at the Lucerne Festival once so far: on August 27, 2023 with the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, when she conducted works by Verdi, Stankovych and Beethoven.

July 2023