Bio
Kyle Knox
Associate Conductor
In the fall of 2018, Kyle Knox assumed the positions of Music Director of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras and Associate Conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Recent past and upcoming conducting credits include the Milwaukee Symphony (on both their Family and Connections concert series), the Madison Symphony’s Beyond the Score (including Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4), their full annual Education Series (including their Fall and Spring Youth Concerts, Community Concerts, Symphony Soup, and the Bolz Final Forte), as well as Concert on the Green. In works for the stage, Kyle led Mark Adamo’s Little Women for Madison Opera, and later helped coordinate a studio artist showcase in the first ever collaboration between that company and WYSO. Other stage credits include Albert Herring, The Turn of the Screw, and Transformations with UW Opera, as well as Die Fledermaus, The Gondoliers and H.M.S. Pinafore with Madison Savoyards. Additionally he has conducted UW Music Clinic’s High School Honors Orchestra.
He was formerly a clarinetist with the Milwaukee Symphony, Santa Fe Opera, and Philadelphia Orchestras, and on faculty at UW-Milwaukee. His festival credits include Tanglewood, Spoleto (Italy), Santa Fe Chamber Music, and Bowdoin Summer Music Festivals, as well as the New York String Orchestra Seminar. He has recorded for the Koch and Naxos labels and has been featured numerous times on NPR’s Performance Today.
Kyle has premiered works by Osvaldo Golijov, Tan Dun, Sean Shepherd, Huang Ruo, and Jonathan Leshnoff, among many others. Nico Muhly’s chamber work Service Music (2004) was written for and dedicated to him. His debut album, a recording of Conrad Susa’s chamber opera Transformations (the work’s world premiere recording) was recently released on Spotify.
Kyle studied conducting with James Smith, and clarinet with Ricardo Morales and Yehuda Gilad. He holds degrees from Juilliard and UW-Madison.