Kazuki Yamada

Kazuki Yamada was born in 1979 in Kanagawa (Japan), and has been the chief conductor and artistic advisor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) since April 2023. Previously, since 2018, he was the orchestra’s principal guest conductor. Alongside his position in Birmingham he is the artistic and music director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. In 2019 he conducted both orchestras in Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the CBSO Chorus, in Monte Carlo. In June 2023 he will return to Monte Carlo with the CBSO Chorus for a performance of Carmina Burana.

In Japan, Kazuki Yamada remains principal guest conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, and appears regularly as a guest artist with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo. In summer 2023 he will tour around Japan with the CBSO.

In the 2022/23 season he has made debuts at the BBC Proms, and with the Belgian National Orchestra, the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra. He has also worked with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Orchestre national du Capitole du Toulouse, the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra. He has recently conducted Saint-Saëns’s rarely performed opera Déjanire and Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust at the Opéra de Monte-Carlo.

Future engagements for Kazuki Yamada include projects with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Orquesta y Coro Nacionales de España and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin.

He performs regularly with soloists such as Emanuel Ax, Leif Ove Andsnes, Seong-Jin Cho, Isabelle Faust, Martin Helmchen, Nobuko Imai, Alexandre Kantorow, Evgeny Kissin, Daniel Lozakovich, Maria João Pires, Baiba Skride, Arabella Steinbacher, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Krystian Zimerman and Frank Peter Zimmermann.

Kazuki Yamada studied at the University of the Arts in Tokyo. He first came to international attention in 2009, when he won first prize at the Concours international de jeunes chefs d’orchestre de Besançon. He is dedicated to regular work educating younger generations of musicians, and appears annually at the Seiji Ozawa International Academy in Switzerland.