Biography
Luke Poeppel is an American-German conductor based in Rochester, New York. Starting in the 2024-2025 season, he will serve as an assistant conductor to the Kansas City Symphony for Matthias Pintscher’s first season as music director. He is a 2024 graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he received his Master’s in Conducting under the tutelage of Brad Lubman and Timothy Long. Committed to the performance of contemporary music, he led works at Eastman by composers including Knussen, Abrahamsen, Davies, Webern, Léon, Jalbert, and Karchin; he also conducted the U.S. premieres of Hannah Kendall’s shouting forever into the receiver (2022) and Philippe Manoury’s Vier Lieder aus Kein Licht (2022). He has served as a cover conductor for the Kansas City Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Tokyo Symphony, the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestra of the League of Composers, Ensemble Signal, Contemporaneous, and more.
Poeppel was one of two conductors selected for Ensemble Modern’s 2023-2024 ICCS young_professionals program, culminating in a performance at the cresc… festival in Frankfurt, Germany. He has received conducting fellowships from the soundSCAPE Festival and the Mostly Modern Festival. As a collaborative pianist, Luke has played for Contemporaneous, American Opera Projects, Mostly Modern Festival, OSSIA New Music Ensemble, and Eastman Opera Theater. Passionate about opera, he has assisted on (or played for) works including Robert Paterson’s In Real Life I/II & Extraordinary (Mostly Modern), Alex Weiser’s The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language (American Opera Projects), and numerous productions at Eastman Opera Theater (Lear on the 2nd Floor, Florencia en el Amazonas, We’ve Got Our Eye on You, Dido and Aeneas, Ariadne auf Naxos, The Telephone, and Dialogue of the Carmelites). He also served as the Music Director of Rochester Summer Opera in 2023.
Poeppel graduated with departmental honors (for his song-cycle Three Songs for Molly) from New York University in 2022. Outside of performance, Poeppel has worked as a research assistant for Dr. Nori Jacoby at the Frankfurt-based Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics between 2020 and 2022 in the Computational Auditory Perception group. During this time, he completed a study on computational techniques for rhythmic search and annotation in the context of Olivier Messiaen’s transcriptions of birdsong. This research was accepted and presented at the 2021 Society for Music Theory Conference.
(Last updated October 21, 2024)
