Kenneth Woods

Conductor Kenneth Woods maintains a busy schedule of appearances across Britain while occupying the posts of principal conductor and artistic director with the English Symphony Orchestra. Beyond the podium he also performs as a cellist in recordings made by his own string trio, teaches, composes, and maintains a widely followed blog.

Born in the United States in 1968, Woods pursued conducting studies at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and later worked with David Zinman, Leonard Slatkin, Jorma Panula, and Gerhard Samuel. Zinman invited him into the inaugural cohort of the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen, Colorado, in 2000; the following year Slatkin admitted him to the Kennedy Center National Conducting Institute in Washington, D.C., one of only four participants. By then Woods had already begun professional engagements as conductor of the Dayton Philharmonic in Ohio and both the Grande Ronde Symphony and Oregon East Symphony in Oregon. From 1999 to 2002 he taught conducting, strings, and chamber music at Eastern Oregon University.

Woods’s recording activity expanded once he became established in Britain during the late 2000s. In 2009 he was appointed principal guest conductor of the Orchestra of the Swan, and together with that ensemble and the Northern Sinfonia he produced the first complete recordings of the symphonies of Hans Gál for the Avie label, which has also issued several of Woods’s own compositions. His orchestral arrangements encompass the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, Op. 26, and Viktor Ullmann’s String Quartet No. 3. Woods has actively promoted the composers grouped by the Nazi regime under the heading Entartete Musik. Guest engagements have taken him to the National Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, among many others. He co-founded the string trio Ensemble Epomeo and recorded works by Gál and Hans Krása with that group.

Named principal conductor and artistic director of the English Symphony Orchestra in 2013, Woods continued in the role into the early 2020s. He assumed artistic direction of the Colorado MahlerFest in 2015 and remains in that post. Frequent recordings with the English Symphony Orchestra have appeared on Signum Classics and Nimbus Alliance; the latter issued his 2023 album devoted to the music of Philip Sawyers, a composer whose work he has long supported. At that point Woods’s discography numbered roughly thirty releases. He authors the blog “A View from the Podium” and has supplied program notes for numerous organizations.