Ken Yanagisawa

Japanese-American conductor Ken Yanagisawa is the music director of the Boston Opera Collaborative, the associate conductor of the Boston Civic Symphony, the assistant conductor of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. He made his Japanese debut conducting Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte with Kansai Nikikai and the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra in February 2023 and will be returning to work with Nikikai in the fall of 2026 to commemorate their 100th opera production to date with a performance of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito. This past summer, Yanagisawa attended the Aspen Music Festival as a 2024 Aspen Conducting Academy Fellow and was awarded the James Conlon Conductor Prize. Formerly a Conducting Apprentice with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, he has worked with the National Symphony Orchestra, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Berlin Academy of American Music, and Plymouth Philharmonic as cover conductor. He has also served as a kapellmeister with the Berlin Opernfest, working on its productions of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Puccini’s Suor Angelica & Gianni Schicchi and Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, and made his European debut with the Bacau Philharmonic Orchestra in September 2018.

In addition to music performance, Yanagisawa has experience working as an orchestra librarian for Boston University’s College of Fine Arts, as an artistic administrator for the New York Philharmonic, and as a freelance photographer. His work has been published in Time, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Playbill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Yes! Weekly, and The Yale Daily News.