Nikolas Caoile

Nikolas Caoile is music director and conductor of the Wenatchee Valley Symphony Orchestra and director of orchestras at Central Washington University. Trained as both a conductor and a pianist, he made his professional conducting debut in 2002 with the Olympia Symphony Orchestra and still performs regularly as a collaborative and solo pianist. For this program he appears in the keyboard chair rather than on the podium, playing the parts that thread through Max Richter's reworking of Vivaldi's Four Seasons.

Caoile trained as a pianist and percussionist before turning to conducting, and that dual background suits a piece like Richter's The Four Seasons Recomposed, which layers keyboard textures under the strings rather than treating the piano as a soloist out front. Expect his playing here to function as part of the orchestra's fabric, holding down the steady, pulsing figures that give Richter's score its hypnotic quality, while the violin soloist carries the melodic line above. Because he is also the orchestra's music director, his playing is likely to sit closely locked in with the ensemble's phrasing, the kind of internal coordination that comes from knowing a group's sound from the podium as well as from inside a section.

Caoile started piano at age six and was later a member of the Portland Youth Philharmonic as a pianist and percussionist. He made his professional conducting debut in 2002 with the Olympia Symphony Orchestra and went on to complete a Doctor of Musical Arts in orchestral conducting at the University of Michigan. He is now music director and conductor of the Wenatchee Valley Symphony Orchestra and director of orchestras at Central Washington University, and continues to perform regularly as a collaborative and solo pianist alongside his conducting work.