* En anglais uniquement
Conductor
Michael Stern is a prominent specialist in contemporary music and American music. Since 2005, he has been the music director of the Kansas City Symphony Orchestra.
Stern was born in New York on December 17, 1959. His father was the superstar violinist
Isaac Stern, and he took up the violin at age three. As an undergraduate at Harvard University,
Michael majored in history, but he went on for conducting studies at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, studying with
Max Rudolf and graduating in 1986.
Rudolf became a major mentor, and
Stern was eventually invited to co-edit the third edition of
Rudolf's conducting textbook.
Stern also studied during summers at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute and the Pierre Monteux Memorial School in Maine and participated in
Leonard Bernstein's conducting workshops with the
New York Philharmonic. The latter post entailed conducting the
Philharmonic in two concerts. He landed a post as the conducting assistant to
Christoph von Dohnányi at the
Cleveland Orchestra just before his graduation from Curtis, remaining in Cleveland until 1991 when he moved to France to become the permanent guest conductor of the
Orchestre National de Lyon. From 1996 to 2000, he was the chief conductor of the
Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra in Germany, becoming the group's first American conductor and touring with it across Europe and in China. Returning to the U.S., he founded the
IRIS Orchestra in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, and has built it into an important specialist ensemble in contemporary music. He also conducted a large variety of major American and European orchestras, including the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the
Philadelphia Orchestra, and the
Vienna Radio Symphony, which he led on a China tour. In 2005,
Stern was named the music director of the Kansas City Symphony, a position he continued to hold as of 2020.
Stern's recording career began in 2001 when he and the
Saarbrücken Radio Symphony backed pianist
Stefan Litwin in a recording of
concertos by Henry Cowell. He has recorded, mostly with the Kansas City Symphony, for the Reference Recordings, Naxos, and Avie labels, releasing an album of music by Jonathan Leshnoff with the Kansas City Symphony on Reference Recordings in 2020.