Conductor Michael Stern has long been devoted to building and leading highly acclaimed orchestras known not only for their impeccable musicianship and creative programming, but also for collaborative, sustainable cultures that often include a vision of music as service to the community. He is passionate about working with young musicians not only in music making, but also to incorporate the idea of “service” into their experiences as they become the artists and advocates of the future who will take classical music into the 21st century and beyond.

Stern is Music Director of Orchestra Lumos (formerly Stamford Symphony) and the National Repertory Orchestra, a unique fellowship program for aspiring young musicians, and whose alumni populate every major orchestra across the United States.  He is Music Director Emeritus of the Kansas City Symphony where he just concluded his 19-year tenure and is Artistic Advisor of Iris Orchestra in Germantown, Tennessee.

During Stern’s acclaimed tenure with the Kansas City Symphony, he and the orchestra were recognized for their remarkable artistic ascent, original programming, organizational development, stability, and extraordinary audience growth. The orchestra explored a wide range of repertoire and commissioned a number of new works and partnered with GRAMMY® Award-winning Reference Recordings for a collection of acclaimed recordings that includes commissions by American composers Adam Schoenberg and Jonathan Leshnoff as well as Gustav Holst’s “The Planets”; and works by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Hindemith, Prokofiev, Bartok and more.

Stern co-founded Iris Orchestra in 2000 and was Founding Artistic Director and Principal Conductor until 2021-22, when he had planned to step down from his post. With his departure, staff, community and musicians joined together to reinvent the orchestra as the Iris Collective, devising a new way for a 21st-century organization to offer a spectrum of events, from chamber music and smaller ensemble programs to full orchestral performances, teaming up with a number of creative partners, including Stern who continues his involvement as Artistic Advisor.

North American conducting engagements for Stern have included the orchestras of Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and the National Symphony.  He debuted with the New York Philharmonic in 1986 in a program titled, “Leonard Bernstein and Three Young America Conductors” and has conducted them several times since.  Internationally he has led major orchestras in London, Stockholm, Paris, Helsinki, Budapest, Seoul, Israel, Moscow, Taiwan, and Tokyo. Stern has been Chief Conductor of Germany’s Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lyon in France, and Principal Guest Conductor of the Orchestre National de Lille, France.

Stern received his music degree from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and is a 1981 graduate of Harvard University.