Kevin Fitzgerald

Kevin Fitzgerald has been the Associate Conductor of the Jacksonville Symphony since the 2022/23 Season, during which he conducted over 35 performances with the orchestra. In July 2023, he won the Special Prize for the Best Performance of the Contemporary Piece at the Mahler Competition, a prize sponsored by the Mahler Foundation. In 2021, he was a Tanglewood Music Center Conducting Fellow and, beginning in 2019, has been awarded Career Assistance Grants by the Solti Foundation U.S. for four consecutive years. In the 2023/24 Season, Fitzgerald is excited to lead a recording of Sean Shepherd’s Concerto for Ensemble with the University of Chicago’s Grossman Ensemble and to make his subscription debut with the Cape Symphony. Also this season, Fitzgerald will return to the New York Philharmonic as a cover conductor for three programs. 

  In addition to his post in Jacksonville, Fitzgerald has recently guest conducted the Rochester Philharmonic, North Carolina Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh and the Manhattan School of Music Symphony Orchestra. In his commitment to uplifting communities through music, Fitzgerald conducted a concert of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 2017 with musicians from the Detroit, Lansing and Grand Rapids Symphonies in response to the federal travel ban limiting immigration. Raising over $10,000, the funds were donated to the International Rescue Committee and Freedom House Detroit, organizations which both support refugees. 

  In 2016, he also co-organized and conducted an impromptu performance in under 48 hours as a dedication to the victims of the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. The event, known as “Requiem for Orlando,” featured over 400 volunteer musicians performing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem Mass in d minor, K.626 and a full-capacity audience in Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium. University of Michigan Professor Emeritus George Shirley sang the tenor solo role and shared this about the performance: “I assure you that the precision, musicality and interpretative incisiveness defining Fitzgerald’s leadership produced from all a result no less impressive than that I have experienced as a soloist in performances with Herbert von Karajan and Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos.”  

  Fitzgerald founded the Michigan-based contemporary music ensemble ÆPEX Contemporary Performance in 2015, which performs music by under-represented, 20th and 21st century composers.  

  Fitzgerald received his bachelor’s degrees in Trumpet and Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with James Thompson, Mark Scatterday and Brad Lubman. Under the tutelage of Kenneth Kiesler, he received his master’s degree from the University of Michigan. Since then, he has participated in masterclasses with Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony, with Andris Nelsons and Alan Gilbert at Tanglewood and with Matthias Pintscher at the Lucerne Festival Academy Orchestra.