Artist Biographies

Christopher James Lees

resident conductor

Emerging American conductor Christopher James Lees brings passionate and nuanced orchestral performances to the stage, a fierce commitment to contemporary music, and a natural charisma to audiences all around the world.

In 2018, Mr. Lees began an appointment as Resident Conductor of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra and Principal Conductor of the Charlotte Symphony Youth Orchestra. In addition to the more than 50 annual concert appearances with the CSO, he has stepped in to conduct Subscription Classical performances on four occasions, including a gala weekend with Grammy Award winning artist and Jazz legend Branford Marsalis in May 2021.

An active guest conductor, Mr. Lees has returned for performances with the Los Angeles and Rochester Philharmonics, the Houston, Detroit, Milwaukee, North Carolina, Portland, and Flint Symphonies, and conducted debuts with the Indianapolis, Kansas City, Toledo, and Vermont Symphonies.

Additional engagements have taken him to the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestra de Chambre de Paris, Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and at the Music in the Mountains Festival & Festival Internacional de Inverno de Campos do Jordão in Brazil.

Only the second American Gustavo Dudamel Conducting Fellow with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Mr. Lees made his debut with the orchestra in April 2013 and returned for concerts in February 2015.

With the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis & Atlanta Symphonies, among others, Mr. Lees has served as assistant conductor for the world’s leading conductors, including: Gustavo Dudamel, Paavo Järvi, Herbert Blomstedt, Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson, Robert Spano, Marin Alsop, Pablo Heras-Casado, Stéphane Danève, Susanna Mälkki, and Nicholas McGegan.

A recipient of a Career Assistance Grant from the Solti Foundation US, Mr. Lees was also chosen for showcase on the Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation National Conductor Preview, hosted by the League of American Orchestras and Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

A dedicated advocate for music of our time, Mr. Lees has premiered more than one hundred fifty new works by a diverse range of composers, and collaborated closely with Pulitzer Prize winners John Adams, William Bolcom, John Corigliano, Jennifer Higdon, Joseph Schwantner, Steven Stucky, Caroline Shaw, Roger Reynolds, and Julia Wolfe.

An equally passionate advocate for music education, Mr. Lees has brought inspirational energy to student orchestras across the country, from the Colburn School to the New England Conservatory, and previously served on the faculties of the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

A native of Washington, D.C., Mr. Lees holds bachelors and master’s degrees from the University of Michigan, and has studied conducting with Larry Rachleff and Robert Spano, as well as having participated in masterclasses with Lorin Maazel, Michael Tilson Thomas, Gustav Meier, and Jorma Panula.

When not performing, Mr. Lees can be found building Lego sets with his six year old son, reading the stack of books by his nightstand, or training outdoors for his next 10K road race.

Rhiannon Giddens

banjo, viola, vocals

The acclaimed musician Rhiannon Giddens uses her art to excavate the past and reveal bold truths about our present. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient, Giddens co-founded the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, and she has been nominated for seven additional Grammys for her work as a soloist and collaborator. She was most recently won the 2022 Grammy for Best Folk Album for her collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, They’re Calling Me Home (2021), a twelve-track album recorded in Ireland during the recent lockdown; it speaks of the longing for the comfort of home as well as the metaphorical “call home” of death, which has been a tragic reality for so many during the COVID-19 crisis.

Giddens’s lifelong mission is to lift up people whose contributions to American musical history have previously been erased, and to work toward a more accurate understanding of the country’s musical origins. Pitchfork has said of her work, “few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration,” and Smithsonian Magazine calls her “an electrifying artist who brings alive the memories of forgotten predecessors, white and black.”

Among her many diverse career highlights, Giddens has performed for the Obamas at the White House, served as a Carnegie Hall Perspectives curator, and received an inaugural Legacy of Americana Award from Nashville’s National Museum of African American History in partnership with the Americana Music Association. Her critical acclaim includes indepth profiles by CBS Sunday Morning, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR’s Fresh Air, among many others.

Giddens is featured in Ken Burns’s Country Music series, which aired on PBS in 2019, where she speaks about the African American origins of country music. She is also a member of the band Our Native Daughters with three other black female banjo players, Leyla McCalla, Allison Russell, and Amythyst Kiah, and co-produced their debut album Songs of Our Native Daughters (2019), which tells stories of historic black womanhood and survival.

Named Artistic Director of Silkroad in 2020, Giddens is developing a number of new programs for the organization, including one inspired by the history of the American transcontinental railroad and the cultures and music of its builders. She recently wrote the music for an original ballet, Lucy Negro Redux, for Nashville Ballet (premiered in 2019), and the libretto and music for an original opera, Omar, based on the autobiography of the enslaved man Omar Ibn Said for the Spoleto USA Festival (premiered in 2022).

As an actor, Giddens had a featured role on the television series Nashville.

Rhiannon Giddens & Francesco Turrisi

Francesco Turrisi

banjo, viola, vocals

Grammy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi has been defined a “musical alchemist” and a “musical polyglot” by the press.

Turrisi left his native Italy in 1997 to study jazz piano and early music at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where he obtained a Bachelor and a Master’s degree. Since 2004 he has been working successfully as a freelance musician. He was a member of the celebrated early music ensemble L’Arpeggiata, performing at the most important classical music festivals in Europe and around the world and has recorded for Warner, Virgin, Naive and Alpha.

Turrisi has released five critically acclaimed albums as a leader and two as co-leader — Tarab, a cross boundary innovative ensemble that blends Irish and Mediterranean traditional music, and Zahr, a project that looks at connections between southern Italian traditional music and Arabic music. His latest piano solo album, Northern Migrations, was described as “delicate, wistful and wholly engrossing” by the Irish Times.

In 2018 Turrisi began to collaborate with American GrammyAward winning singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Together the duo has released two critically acclaimed albums – their 2019 debut project there is no Other, and their most recent release They’re Calling Me Home which took home the 2022 Grammy for Best Folk Album.

He is equally at home playing with jazz veterans Dave Liebman and Gianluigi Trovesi as he is with Irish traditional sean-nós singer Roisin El Safty and with tarantella specialist Lucilla Galeazzi. Turrisi has toured with Bobby McFerrin, interpreted the music of Steve Reich with Bang on a Can All Stars, accompanied flamenco star Pepe El Habichuela and Greek singer Savina Yannatou.

Jason Sypher

double bass

Jason Sypher is a multifaceted bassist who has had a varied career as an interpreter of folk styles and jazz, a restless creative force on the bass who can bow on the instrument like a fiddler, pluck like an old time banjo or just drive a tune into bedrock. Originally studying jazz in San Francisco and Oregon, he moved to New Orleans and immersed himself in blues, cajun, jazz and zydeco creating his style and sound up from the streets to the clubs. Within a few years he was recording and performing with legends Irma Thomas, Clifton Chenier Jr., Little Freddie King, Kermit Ruffins and Clarence Gatemouth Brown. He has lived in the mountains of North Carolina and on the canals of Amsterdam absorbing the music wherever he travels.

Sypher has performed and recorded with Leon Redbone, Howard Fishman, Mike Compton, I Draw Slow, Susan McKeown and The Sweetback Sisters. He toured twice with the well-known Irish supergroup Lunasa who introduced him to Japan. In the fall of 2014 he began playing with multiple Grammy-winning singer/instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens. Over the past several years he has anchored the many iterations of Giddens’ musical endeavors from large electric bands to intimate acoustic trios. He resides in New York City and Japan where he continues to be an in-demand session player and performer.