Christopher Latham, OAM

DIRECTOR

Canberra-based musician Christopher Latham, OAM trained as a violinist in the U.S. for a decade before touring with the ACO for seven seasons, including six concerts in Wigmore and Carnegie Halls. He then became editor for Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Elena Kats-Chernin and many other leading Australian composers, while overseeing the Australian publishing operations of Boosey and Hawkes (1998-2013).

He directed the Four Winds Festival (2004-08), the Australian Festival of Chamber Music (2006-2007) and the Canberra International Music Festival (2009-2014). He was Canberra’s ‘Artist of the Year’ during its 2013 centenary. He was the music director of the DVA’s Gallipoli Symphony (2005-2015) and currently directs the Flowers of Peace, which measures the cultural cost of war in music and painting. Cultural recovery activities also produced the first recordings of the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly, including the lost ‘Gallipoli Sonata’, the manuscript of which he recovered in Florence.

In 2015 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Canberra for this work. In 2016 he was made Knight in the order of Arts and Letters by the French Government, and in 2017 he was appointed Artist in Residence at the Australian War Memorial, their first musician in that role, until 2025. In 2018 he directed the Diggers’ Requiem which premiered in France and Australia in 2018, telling through music, the story of the Australian soldiers on the Western Front. In 2021, Vietnam Requiem , in 2022, the POW Requiem and in 2023, the Peacekeeping Symphony. All these concerts will comprise a free set of National Commemorative Works addressing trauma from war. He received the Order of Australia medal in 2022.