Music Director - Mark Latham
The New Hampshire Philharmonic Orchestra is pleased to introduce, Mark Latham, Music Director and Conductor of the Orchestra. The 2024-2025 calendar of concerts will be Mark's 12th season with The Phil.
​Mark Latham received his musical training at the Guildhall School (London), the Philadelphia College of Performing Arts, Brooklyn College Conservatory, and the University of Michigan, where he earned his Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Conducting. Mark was privileged to have studied with some of the great musicians and pedagogues of the past century: violin with Masao Kawasaki, Dorothy DeLay and Itzhak Perlman; and chamber music with the Juilliard, Emerson and American Quartets, with Eugene Lehner of the Kolisch Quartet, and Zoltan Zekely of the Hungarian Quartet.
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As a violinist, he was a member of the Atlantic String Quartet for 6 years in St. John's, Canada, where he made many recordings with CBC Radio. He has been a regular with Emmanuel Music in Boston and the New England Bach Festival, and previously was a member of the New Hampshire, Delaware and New Haven Symphonies. He is a founding member of the Aryaloka String Quartet.
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Mark’s primary conducting mentors were Kenneth Kiesler and Gustav Meier, Larry Rachlef, Marin Alsop and Helmuth Rilling. He has served as music director of several orchestras in Canada, Michigan and New England, including the Nashua Chamber Orchestra and the Cambridge Symphony. In Michigan, he was music director of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. He has conducted the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra in Santa Cruz, CA, the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra, and the MIT Symphony Orchestra.
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He has conducted numerous world premieres and his own works have been performed in the UK, Canada and the US including at New York’s 92nd St. Y. He is a member ‘in absentia’ of the Canadian contemporary improv ensemble "The Black Auks" with whom he has made several recordings. Recent seasons have included directing the All City Orchestra in Salem, Oregon; conducting Mary Poppins in Chelmsford, MA; directing the New Hampshire All State Chamber Orchestra; and premiering a new Requiem by the Vermont composer Robert Griffin as well as a trilogy of operas in Boston and New Hampshire.
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Mark holds a deep belief that music is transformational and can be a broad and powerful educational and social medium for both children and adults. He has conducted many youth and community orchestras, and led music seminars and workshops at all levels in the US, Canada and Europe. He was music director of the New Hampshire Youth Symphony Orchestra and the Concord Academy Orchestra, and has taught composition and general music at MusicWorks in the UK, a chamber music program for Europe’s finest young string and piano players. Each summer he conducts and coaches amateur musicians at CAMMAC in Quebec, and directs the orchestra and gives master classes at the Iceberg Chamber Music Institute in Newfoundland. Mark previously led the University Orchestra at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he taught as adjunct professor of conducting, violin and viola, and chamber music.