Italy's Puccini Festival Nominates Jan Latham-Koenig as Next Artistic Director

Latham-Koenig will direct the Torre del Lago festival between 2024 and 2026

The English conductor Jan Latham-Koenig has recently been nominated as the new Artistic Director of the Puccini Festival, an annual summer festival held annually in Torre del Lago in celebration of the composer's works. Latham-Koenig will step into the role for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 editions of the festival.

Latham-Koenig has already appeared at the festival, though as a pianist rather than as a conductor. In 2017 he accompanied soprano Natalia Gaudefroy's performance of Poulenc's La voix humaine.

Born in England and of French, Danish, and Polish ancestry, Latham-Koenig studied at the Royal College of Music. He is presently Music Director of the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, and is founder and Artistic Director of the Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra.

Latham-Koenig has made more than fifty recordings, with a special focus on lesser-known works by Kurt Weill, Donizetti, Leoncavallo, Ibert, and Poulenc.

"This is a cultural choice of the highest level, because the new director artistically is...an extremely profound conductor and full of interpretative skills," said Luigi Ficacci, the festival's president. "He is a creator of orchestral and vocal talents. I say this as part of the audience who judges from the seat of the stalls: when I heard of his availability I was very happy. It is an important event for the international opening of our Festival, which derives from its ability to restore the musical greatness of Puccini."

"Such an interpreter of Puccini's musical and orchestral structure will allow the public to understand the greatness of the construction of Puccini's musical drama," he added. "We receive it in its final result which is the emotional effect, but the interpretative clarity of a conductor like Latham-Koenig allows everyone to understand how musical complexity manages to achieve that emotional effect that seems natural to us, so famous and popular are Puccini's operas."