Kevin John Edusei

The son of a Ghanaian physicist and a German pastor, Kevin John Edusei was born in Bielefeld in 1976. He studied percussion, sound engineering, and conducting at the University of the Arts in Berlin and at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where Jac van Steen and Ed Spanjaard were among his teachers. As a scholarship holder at the Aspen Festival in 2004, he found an important model in David Zinman; he graduated from the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2007 and worked with Pierre Boulez and Peter Eötvös. As the winner of the Mitropoulos Competition in Athens in 2008, he became known in international music circles. Edusei began his professional career in 2004 as Principal Kapellmeister at Theater Bielefeld; starting in 2007, he held this position for four years at Theater Augsburg. In 2014, he took up the post of Principal Conductor at the Munich Symphony Orchestra, which he led until 2022; at the same time, from 2015 to 2019, he also held musical responsibility at the Konzert Theater Bern. He will assume the position of Principal Guest Conductor with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra in Texas in the 2022-23 season. Edusei has conducted the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Rotter-
dam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the Bamberg Symphony, and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. His 2022-23 engagements include the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and he will lead a series of performances of Puccini’s La Bohème at the Royal Opera House in London. Other opera conducting engagements have taken him to the Semperoper Dresden, Volksoper Wien, Komische Oper Berlin, Hamburg Staatsoper, and English National Opera. Within his wide-ranging repertoire, he focuses especially on the music of early Romanticism and classical Modernism. He has released several CDs with the Munich Symphony Orchestra and the Bern Symphony Orchestra.

Lucerne Festival debut on 1 September 2007, when Kevin John Edusei joined with Pablo Heras-Casado and Lin Liao conducted the Orchestra of the Lucerne Festival Academy in Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

August 2022