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Kevin Griffiths

London-born Swiss conductor Kevin Griffiths belongs to the third generation of conductors in the family.

 

He is a regular guest at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad and the Vaduz Classic Festival in Liechtenstein. Since last summer he has also been a guest at the “Rheingau Music Festival” and the “Klosters Music” Festival. Furthermore, he conducted a production with the Schauspielhaus Zürich and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra at the “Holland Festival” in Amsterdam and the “Venice Biennale”.

 

Kevin Griffiths has performed with well-known orchestras such as the hr-Symphony Orchestra Frankfurt a. M., the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz, the Staatskapelle Weimar, the Belgrade Philharmonic, the Slovak Philharmonic, the Basel Symphony Orchestra, the Basel and Zurich Chamber Orchestras. From 2011 to 2018 he was artistic director and chief conductor of the Collegium Musicum Basel.

 

Due to his interest in historical performance practice, Griffiths enjoys devoting himself to early music and has worked with orchestras specializing in this repertoire such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in London and the Ensemble Musica Aeterna in Bratislava.

 

The soloists he has worked with include Sir James Galway, Pierre-Laurant Aimard, Kian Soltani, Reinhold Friedrich, Vesselina Kasarova, Fazil Say, Isabelle van Keulen. Well-known composers include Steve Reich and Enjott Schneider. His artistic activities are manifold; his CD recordings for Warner Classics, Sony, CPO and Prospero Classical bear witness to this diversity. These include new musical discoveries and first recordings by Mozart and Beethoven contemporaries such as Andreas Romberg, Johann Evangelist Brandl and Johann Stamitz, but also Swiss romantics such as Paul Juon and Hans Huber.

 

Kevin Griffiths also became involved in contemporary music early on and gained international recognition as co-founder and conductor of the London Steve Reich Ensemble. His debut CD with the ensemble was awarded the prestigious Diapason D’Or prize.

 

In 2020, Kevin Griffiths launched the “Artists For A Better Planet” charity concert series in Zurich. With their first two concerts they collected over 50,000 Swiss francs. He was able to attract world-class artists such as Kian Soltani, Maurice Steger, Aeneas Humm and Sandra Studer. In the realm of film music, “Disney Studios” in Hollywood accredited Kevin Griffiths so that he is licensed to synchronize the original film scores “live” to the motion picture with an orchestra. Since the City Light Symphony Orchestra Lucerne was founded in 2018, he has been a permanent guest conductor for their concerts. They recorded two CD recordings together. The first film music recording “Spotlight on John Williams” was released in 2021, was nominated for the “German Record Critics’ Prize” and has received almost 1.5 million streams on Spotify alone to date. The second “Adventures” recording will be released at the end of this year.