Dane Lam

Conductor

Dane Lam

The young Australian-Chinese conductor, Dane Lam, Principal Conductor of China’s Xi’an Symphony Orchestra, enjoys a career spanning three continents.

With a particularly close relationship with London’s Opera Holland Park, he is equally at home in the theatre as on the concert platform. He was recently appointed Resident Conductor and Associate Music Director of Opera Queensland.

Dane made his debut, aged only eighteen, with the Sydney Symphony at the Sydney Opera House and has since conducted an array of leading international orchestras and opera companies including: the Queensland, Adelaide, Canberra, Dunedin, Kunming, Shandong, and Suzhou Symphony Orchestras, Münchner Rundfunkorchester, Het Residentie Orkest, City of London Sinfonia, Manchester Camerata, South Bank Sinfonia, Liverpool Philharmonic Ensemble 10/10, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Beethoven Orchester Bonn, Verbier Festival Orchestra, Juilliard Orchestra and Opera Australia, Opera Queensland, Scottish Opera, Chelsea Opera Group and Bury Court Opera.

His London mainstage debut with OHP’s La Cenerentola attracted widespread critical and popular acclaim. Subsequent appearances at OHP have included Così fan tutte, L’arlesiana, Don Giovanni, Aida, Il barbiere di Siviglia, Norma and Will Todd’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Dane was honoured by the broader opera community with a nomination as Best Newcomer in the International Opera Awards 2018. 

In his other musical home, the ancient city of Xi’an, the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra has grown under Dane’s leadership. Since assuming the post of Principal Conductor in 2014, XSO’s classical subscription offering has almost doubled while attendance has increased commensurately. He led the first staged, professional operas in this 3000-year-old city with Tosca in 2015 and Le nozze di Figaro in 2016; he has raised the artistic standard and profile of the orchestra to attract such soloists as Jose Carreras, Nikolai Demidenko, Midori Goto, Stephen Hough, Yundi Li, Anne Sophie Mutter, Feng Ning and Liwei Qin. 

Last season’s engagements included Dane’s debut with Opera Australia, conducting La bohème; a return to Opera Holland Park for a new production of L’arlesiana; his mainstage debut with Opera Queensland in Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice; Carl Davis’s A Christmas Carol with Het Residentie Orkest and De Dutch Don’t Dance Division in The Hague; concerts with the Adelaide and Suzhou Symphony Orchestras and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera; as well as a full season of concerts with the XSO featuring soloists Nikolai Demidenko, Barry Douglas, Kirill Gerstein and Angela Hewitt, and masterworks including Mahler’s Symphony No. 6.

In 2021/2022, Dane Lam leads seasons of Le nozze di Figaro and La traviata in Brisbane, La clemenza di Tito and La rondine in Canberra and Carmen in Perth; he also conducts the Xi’an, Hawai’i, Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras.

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Queensland Symphony Orchestra respectfully acknowledges the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which the Orchestra works, plays, and creates music, and we pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.