Passing the baton

As the inaugural director of orchestral studies and resident conductor of the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra, Ken Lam led the student orchestra of Tianjin Juilliard School in kicking off the new season with a concert featuring Franz Schubert's Symphony No 8 (also called Unfinished Symphony) and Beethoven's Symphony No 2 on Sept 25 in the school's concert hall.

Throughout the new season, the orchestra will perform symphonies by composers, including Johannes Brahms, Hector Berlioz and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. There will also be contemporary music works, including the world premiere of A Jiangnan Overture, composed by the school's faculty member Niccolo Athens, and Fanfare for Sam, composed by David Serkin Ludwig, who is the dean and director of the music division at the Juilliard School in New York.

The school's music festival, titled Festival Connect, will take place in January 2023, which will celebrate Igor Stravinsky and two contemporary composers: Joan Tower from the United States and Guo Wenjing from China. The program will feature Stravinsky's The Firebird, Tower's Made in America, which won a Grammy Award for best classical contemporary composition in 2008, and Guo's Zhudi (bamboo flute) Concerto No 2, Ye Huo, featuring Chinese bamboo flute soloist Tang Junqiao.

"We want to challenge our students technically and musically with works from different eras and by composers of diverse backgrounds," says Lam, adding that the performance season is designed with the goal of preparing students for their future professional careers. "They not only need to play their own parts, but also need to listen to one another."

For Lam, who only arrived in Tianjin about two months ago, working with the school is a new chapter.

Born in Hong Kong, he lived and worked in the US for decades. He played piano and violin as a child, as well as sang in his school choir. Before launching his career as a conductor, Lam studied economics at Cambridge University and was an attorney specializing in international finance for 10 years.

He says he has benefited from studying multiple majors and gaining working experience besides conducting.

"As an attorney, I had to deal with a lot of people such as clients, especially demanding clients. So I learned to work with them. Those skills also work for me as a conductor, because my job is to inspire the orchestra and enable them to communicate with their musical instruments," he says.

When he worked as an attorney in Hong Kong, Lam was given the opportunity to conduct his local community orchestra when its regular conductor became unavailable. He loved it so much that he began taking conducting master classes in Europe, learning from the likes of Gustav Meier and David Zinman.

In 2011, Lam won an international conducting competition with Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and made his US professional debut with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in June 2008.Until this year, he had been concurrently music director of both the Charleston Symphony Orchestra, since 2015, and of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, since 2017.

"The idea of having a resident conductor of the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra started in 2020 when we had our first group of students of the graduate studies program. However, the plan was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic," says He Wei, CEO and artistic director of the Tianjin school. "The school focuses on collaborative programs, and it's crucial to have a resident conductor who can lead our students to collaborate onstage."

Katherine Chu, dean of the Tianjin school, says, "Lam's work across varied disciplines and cultures — in economics, law and music — places him in a unique position to share the diversity and richness of his professional experiences with our students and faculty members."

The Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra is the school's largest student performing ensemble, comprised of students from the graduate studies program majoring in instrumental and orchestral studies, and instrumental and chamber music studies.

He Wei notes that the involvement of faculty members is very important to the progress of a student orchestra. He also recalls that, shortly after he joined the faculty at Tianjin school, he visited and interviewed Larry Rachleff, who was known for his success in creating the renowned conservatory orchestral program at Rice University's Shepherd School of Music.

"I asked him about the key factors that contribute to the success of a student orchestra and orchestral program. He valued the commitment and involvement of teachers. He said, 'It takes a whole village to educate a student,'" says He Wei, who is a violinist himself. A native of Chengdu, Sichuan province, he has taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for more than 20 years.

As the world's first, and so far, only branch campus of the New York performing arts school, Tianjin Juilliard will also co-present a series of public concerts with a newly formed ensemble of outstanding alumni from both the Juilliard School in New York and the Tianjin school.

Two student soloists will be selected through an annual competition, starting in November, for concerto performances with the Tianjin Juilliard Orchestra in the spring. In February 2023, students from New York and Tianjin will come together in a live collaboration to perform American composer Terry Riley's iconic work In C.