Dane Lam
The young Australian-Chinese conductor, Dane Lam, Principal Conductor of China’s Xi’an Symphony Orchestra, enjoys a career spanning three continents. In early 2023, he was appointed Music Director of the Hawai’i Symphony Orchestra; recently, he was appointed Artistic Director of State Opera South Australia.
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 José 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 Orpheus and Eurydice; 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.
Since 2021, Dane Lam has led seasons of Le nozze di Figaro and La traviata in Brisbane, La clemenza di Tito in Canberra and Carmen in Perth; he also conducted the Xi’an, Hawai’i, Sydney, Melbourne, Queensland, Adelaide and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. He conducted Orpheus and Eurydice for Opera Australia and Così fan tutte in Adelaide. In 2025, he undertakes a full Beethoven Cycle in Hawai’i and leads further performances of Orpheus for Opera Australia.
