Kazuki Yamada is Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO), Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO), and Artistic Director of the Music Division at Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. He also served as the Artistic and Music Director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo (OPMC) for ten years.

His time under the close supervision of Seiji Ozawa served to underline the importance of what Yamada calls his “Japanese feeling” for classical music. Born in 1979 in Kanagawa, he continues to work and perform in Japan every season with the country’s foremost orchestras, including Yomiuri Nippon and NHK Symphony Orchestras as well as The Japan Philharmonic. He spent ten years as Artistic and Music Director (Directeur Artistique et Musical) at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo (OPMC). During his tenure as Music Director of the CBSO, Yamada has regularly toured Japan with the orchestra and in summer 2027 will also lead the CBSO on tour to South Korea.

Kazuki Yamada’s passionate and collaborative approach to conducting means he commands a busy international diary of concerts, opera, and choral conducting. He opens his tenure as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO) in October with a programme bringing together Charles Ives, Edvard Grieg, Anna Clyne and Claude Debussy, offering a first glimpse of the artistic vision behind his inaugural season with the orchestra, where established masterworks are placed alongside contemporary voices to inspire curiosity, reflection and discovery.

With the CBSO he returns to the BBC Proms before continuing his Mahler cycle, opening the season with the Resurrection Symphony and closing with the Third symphony. In the Autumn he embarks on another European tour with the orchestra performing Britten's War Requiem and launches his Beethoven cycle to mark the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death.

Further highlights include his debut with Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and The Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest. He also returns to The Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, The Cleveland Orchestra, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra to name only a few.

Yamada performs with distinguished soloists such as Emanuel Ax, Seong-Jin Cho, Isabelle Faust, Vilde Frang, Martin Helmchen, Nobuko Imai, Janine Jansen, Lucas and Arthur Jussen, Alexandre Kantorow, Evgeny Kissin, Yunchan Lim, Bruce Liu, Alice Sara Ott, Maria João Pires, Fazıl Say, Krystian Zimerman, and Frank Peter Zimmermann.

Strongly committed to his role as an educator, Yamada appears annually as a guest artist at the Seiji Ozawa International Academy Switzerland and is actively involved in the CBSO’s outreach programme. Yamada studied music at the Tokyo University of the Arts where he discovered a love for both Mozart and the Russian romantic repertory. He first achieved international attention upon receiving first prize in the 51st International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors in 2009. Having lived in Japan for most of his life, Kazuki Yamada now resides in Berlin.