Conductor Jan Latham-Koenig has had an unusually varied career, encompassing permanent posts and numerous guest appearances across Europe, the U.S., and Mexico. He is one of the few British conductors to have scored major successes in Eastern Europe and Russia. Latham-Koenig was born in London on December 15, 1953. He studied at the Royal College of Music with Norman del Mar, Kendall Taylor, and Lamar Crowson. He founded the Koenig Ensemble in 1976, and in the early 1980s, he studied further under a Gulbenkian Fellowship. Early in his career, he was also active as a concert pianist. Latham-Koenig conducted Verdi's Macbeth at the Vienna State Opera in 1988 and made a strong impression, ultimately being invited back as the permanent guest conductor in 1991. That was just the beginning of a long string of prestigious operatic guest appearances at such houses as Covent Garden in London, the Opéra National de Paris, and the New National Theatre in Tokyo. His many symphonic appearances have included those with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dresden Philharmonic, and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Latham-Koenig has held principal conductor and music director posts with various orchestras in widely distributed cities around the world, beginning with the Orchestra of Porto (1989-1992), founding that group at the request of the Portuguese government. Beginning in 1997, he was simultaneously music director of the Opéra du Rhin and the Orchestre Philharmonique in Strasbourg in France. Latham-Koenig has served as the music director of Poland's Wrocław Philharmonic and Wratislavia Cantans Festival. He became the artistic director of Moscow's Novaya Opera in 2011, making him the first British director of a major Russian opera house. In the 2010s, he was also active as the music director of the Orquesta Filarmónica de la UNAM in Mexico City, and the Flanders Symphony Orchestra in Bruges, Belgium. He founded the Britten Shostakovich Festival Orchestra in 2019. Latham-Koenig has been heard on recordings on the Chandos, Avie, and Capriccio labels, among others, in both operatic and symphonic repertory. On a 2020 Resonus Classics recording, he joined pianist Mark Bebbington and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for an album of piano-and-orchestra works by Poulenc.