American pianist and coach Kristin Ditlow has appeared as a soloist, collaborative artist, coach, and conductor throughout the United States and abroad. Her conducting has been praised as presenting an “exciting overture,” (Charles Jernigan, when she led Opera Southwest’sNorma), as well as “fine and polished” (regarding her work as a conductor and chorus master). Philadelphia music critic Michael Caruso remarked that her piano performance had “an exquisite sensitivity and exhilarating thrusts of energy, and the Bethlehem Morning Call wrote about her performance of Brahms as having “enormous passion, fine precision, and great musicality.”
Recent concert seasons have featured appearances at San Francisco Opera, Tanglewood Music Center, the Kimmel Center, Carnegie Hall, Hungary’s Zempleni Festival, the Beijing and Shanghai Conservatories, the National Theater in Kunming (Yunnan Province, China) and venues throughout central and northern Italy.
As an opera and voice coach, Dr. Ditlow has served on the faculties and music staffs of the Curtis Institute of Music, Westminster Choir College, Ithaca College, Spoleto Festival USA, Opera Company of Philadelphia, Syracuse Opera, Finger Lakes Opera, San Francisco Opera Center, Delaware Valley Opera Company, the Princeton Festival, the CoOPERAtive Program (Princeton, NJ), Crescendo International Summer Institute (Tokaj and Sárospatak, Hungary), Si Parla, Si Canta (Urbania, Italy) Ameropa International Festival (Prague, Czech Republic).
She has played in master classes for: Kathleen Kelly, Martin Katz, and Warren Jones, Graham Johnson, Malcolm Martineau, Roger Vignoles, Helmut Deutsch, Julius Drake, Wolfram Rieger, and Dalton Baldwin (coach/accompanists); Stephanie Blythe, Vladimir Chernov, Carol Vaness, Sir Thomas Allen, Frederica von Stade, Dawn Upshaw, Lucy Shelton, Robert Holl, Andreas Schmidt, Mira Zakai, and Håkan Hågegard (voice); Joseph Flummerfelt, Robert Spano, Rossen Milanov (conductor), Peter Stumpf, Ida Kavafian, Ettore Causa, Joseph Kalichstein, Itzhak Perlman, and Ida Levin (strings); Gilbert Kalish, Richard Goode, Garrick Ohlsson, Jon Kimura Parker, James Lisney, and Martin Canin (solo piano). She has been a regular studio accompanist for voice teachers including: Marlena Kleinman Malas, Joan Patenude Yarnell, Carol Webber, Rita Shane, Laura Brooks Rice, Sharon Sweet, Margaret Cusack, Mark Moliterno, Lindsay Christensen, Daune Mahy, Lorraine Manz, Marlene Rosen, and Richard Miller.
Dr. Ditlow’s major teachers have included collaborative pianists Dr. Jean Barr, Dr. JJ Penna, Dr. Russell Miller and Dalton Baldwin; solo piano teachers James Goldsworthy, Sandra Carlock, Ailene Mary Nase and Sedmara Zakarian Rutstein; conductors Neil Varon, Brad Lubman and Daniel Beckwith.
In the operatic world, she has assisted the following conductors: Paolo Paroni, Maurizio Barbacini, Robert Spano, Andrew Megill, Thomas Cunningham, Joseph Flummerfelt, Corrado Rovaris, Sir Colin Davis, Anthony Barrese, Marin Alsop, Roger Cantrell, Warren Jackson, Douglas Kinney Frost, Michael Spierman, Benton Hess, Brian DeMaris, Stephen Byess, and Michael Borowitz.
Her facility for languages has led to advanced linguistic study in Italy, France, Austria, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as well as in the United States, and she has taught and coached these languages at the collegiate and professional levels. She has over eighty complete operas in her repertoire, and has served on these productions in many capacities, ranging from conductor and stage director to repetiteur and assistant conductor.
Dr. Ditlow's passion for chamber music and entrepreneurial focus has led to her founding of two chamber ensembles, the Lukens Piano Trio (her current ensemble) and the Mühlenberg Piano Quartet. Dr. Ditlow is devoted to promoting new music, as well as instrumental and vocal chamber music. Her innovative programming includes a variety of vocal chamber music and cross-genre projects. To this end, she is a co-creator of a house-concert series in Albuquerque, entitled Movable Sol.
The summer of 2015 was Kristin's premiere chapter of Albuquerque meets Darmstadt, a curated series of solo concerts of Kristin's. These are performed in New Mexico and Germany. The first two concerts were in the summer of 2015 in Nünberg and Darmstadt. The third chapter will be presented in Albuquerque in October, 2015. Works presented on these include the avant-garde works of the Darmstadt Ferien-Kurse (Messiaen, Berio, Cage, Babbitt), as well as living composers, some whom have written pieces specifically for these performances. The fourth installment, with mezzo-soprano Tara Venditti, took place in 2016 in both Albuquerque and Darmstadt, and featured works of Stefan Hakenberg, Peter Gilbert, Karola Obermüller and Tom Cipullo.
The 2018-2019 season includes her continued position as Assistant Professor of Vocal Coaching at the University of New Mexico. She will return to Philadelphia in December, 2018 to curate the eighth annual “Bach by Candlelight” concert. November 2018 brought the first workshop performance of Nell Shaw Cohen’s Mabel’s Call. 2019 will feature the debut of her first song cycle, “Three Poems of Emily Dickinson,” as well as her new performance projects, Antigua y Moderna and Southwestern Art Song Society. Her newest CD, Providence, with violist Ellen C. Rose, was released in September 2018 worldwide on the Affetto label, and distributed by Naxos.
Dr. Ditlow holds degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music (BM, 2001) Westminster Choir College (MM, 2005) and is a 2014 graduate from the Eastman School of Music with the Doctorate of Musical Arts degree. She maintains a presence on the web at www.kristinditlow.com, as well as a blog at songsoftravelditlow.blogspot.com.
Kristin makes her home in Albuquerque, NM with her husband, violist and string pedagogue Zheng (John) Yuan.