Kristo Kondakçi, Conductor
December 3, 2022 Concert
Albanian–American conductor Kristo Kondakçi occupies a unique platform as a conductor and creative entrepreneur.
As Music Director of the Kendall Square Orchestra, the Narragansett Bay Symphony, and the Eureka Ensemble, he has distinguished himself as a talented and innovative conductor.
Kondakçi began his career in 2014, appearing in performances with the Albanian National Orchestra which received critical acclaim with the Albanian press and public. He continues to enjoy a close relationship with the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet in Albania. He made his European opera debut with the Vienna Summer Music Festival Opera in 2018 and his U.S. opera debut with Boston’s Enigma Chamber Opera in 2020.
The first conductor ever to be officially hired by a biotech company, Kondakçi helped form the Kendall Square Orchestra (K²O) in 2018 together with Elena Spencer and Kelly Clark — with the mission to connect professionals from across the diverse academic and corporate community of Kendall Square through music. Under his leadership, the orchestra has built a community of 70+ musicians that represent over 50 local institutions.
In 2019, he conducted K²O’s inaugural “Symphony for Science” at Boston’s Symphony Hall, an innovative event bringing together local corporate sponsors, community organizations, and audiences to raise awareness, funds, and hope for healthcare and STEM education causes. Now in its fourth year, “Symphony for Science” has raised over $120,000 to support local benefiting organizations.
Kondakçi is a passionate advocate for the power of music to bring people together to inspire them to connect deeply with themselves and others and choose a life of passion, purpose, and self-responsibility. In 2017, this belief inspired him to launch Eureka Ensemble — with the mission to nurture social impact through music. Eureka’s community-intensive programming and performances have been widely praised by PBS, NPR, and the Boston Globe, among other outlets.
In 2018, Kondakçi co-founded the Women’s Chorus (TWC) to connect women experiencing homelessness or poverty in Boston with the healing power of music. The program has impacted more than 100 of Boston’s most vulnerable women from diverse backgrounds with an age span of 17 to 82.
Kondakçi received an Urban Service Award in 2019 from the Berklee School of Music for his work with Eureka Ensemble and the Women’s Chorus. A NowThis News feature on the chorus entitled "It's great to be treated like a human again” was published in August of 2018 and has since been viewed over 3 million times, inspiring similar programs to pop up across the globe.
In March 2020, after the pandemic lockdowns fell into place, Kondakçi joined a team of physicians and musicians led by Dr. Ronald Hirschberg and Dr. Lisa Wong to launch “Boston Hope Music” (BHM), a music & wellness program which was delivered to patients at Boston Hope Medical Center (a field hospital in Boston established to care for patients recovering from COVID-19) to augment the healing process. After the success of this program in spring 2020, the BHM team partnered with the New England Conservatory and Massachusetts General Hospital to focus on the needs of frontline healthcare workers, offering music lessons and songwriting sessions to help cope with stress from the pandemic. Once vaccination centers opened, BHM sent musicians to perform for members of the public receiving their vaccinations at each of the major centers in Boston, including Fenway Park, the Reggie Lewis Center and the Hynes Convention Center, among others.
Kondakçi is dedicated to educating the next generation of musicians and performers. In 2019, he served as interim director of orchestral studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for one term, leading the graduate conducting program in addition to conducting the university orchestras. He has also made a significant contribution to the musicological research of Gustav Mahler’s music through his reconstruction of the original version of Mahler's 1st Symphony (2012). He currently teaches conducting in a private studio and coaches chamber music at Harvard University as a non-resident music tutor with Pforzheimer House. He has also guest lectured at the Longy School of Music and at New England Conservatory.
Off the podium, Kondakçi is passionate about the intersection of music and business. Iin 2018, he designed a leadership development program with Kendall Square Orchestra called “Leading Tone: Transforming Business Through Music”. The program links best practices from the world of music with specific, actionable business behaviors and provides a transformational learning experience for leaders at every level by using ‘conducting an orchestra’ as a metaphor for teamwork and leadership. Since 2018, he has led workshops in Boston with leaders from corporations spanning 12 countries across 4 continents, such as PWC and Kinden Corp.
Kondakçi is also an active public speaker. He has been a featured speaker at TEDxBoston (2018, 2021) and the League of American Orchestras (2019). In his spare time, he volunteers with TEDxYouth@Boston to coach and mentor young speakers.
Kondakçi lives in Boston with his wife.
