Conductor
Music Director
The 2012-2013 season marks Timothy Hankewich's seventh year as the Music Director of Orchestra Iowa. Hankewich, who is popular with audiences and critics alike, has earned an outstanding reputation as a maestro whose classical artistry is as inspiring as his personality is engaging. While conducting Dvorak's Symphony No. 7 in D minor at a Cedar Rapids Symphony concert in January 2006, the Cedar Rapids Gazette applauded him for "directing without a musical score and displaying a command of the selection and the orchestra." In 2002, The Kansas City Star named his performance of Strauss' Four Last Songs one of "15 Great Moments in Classical Music and Dance in 2002." The previous season, following Hankewich's last-minute appearance on the podium for a challenging program of Takemitsu, Adams, Scriabin, and Debussy, critic Paul Horsley described Hankewich as a "commanding figure onstage, with a mellifluously physical conducting style that must be impossible for a player not to respond to. There is an easygoing fluidity to his phrasing, rubato and tempos and the orchestra seems especially animated."
Mr. Hankewich was with the Kansas City Symphony for seven years, as the organization's resident conductor. During his time in Kansas City, Hankewich had the rare talent to captivate a classical audience Saturday night, then turn around and thrill his youngest fans at a Sunday afternoon family concert. His knack for pleasing diverse audiences served him well at the Kansas City Symphony, where he led subscription concerts, directed the Pops and Family Series, conducted community and chamber performances and hosted the Kansas City Symphony Hour broadcast on NPR-affiliate station KCUR-FM 89.3
Winner of the prestigious Aspen Conducting Award, Hankewich enjoys an active career as a guest conductor having appeared with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Orchestra London, Santa Rosa Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, Cleveland Chamber Orchestra, Tulsa Philharmonic, Indiana University Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, Vermont Symphony, University of Evansville Orchestra, Vancouver (WA) Symphony and the China Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra. Hankewich also has served as artist in residence at Park University from 1999 to 2002, artistic director/conductor of the Philharmonia of Greater Kansas City from 1999 to 2002 and interim director of orchestra studies at the University of Kansas.
In 2001-2002, Hankewich was declared winner of the Geraldine C. and Emory Ford Foundation's "Immersion in New American Music for Professional American Conductors" Award. During that same season, he was one of five conductors invited to participate in the American Symphony Orchestra League's 2001 National Conductor Preview. Timothy Hankewich is a native of Dawson Creek, British Columbia. He graduated from the University of Alberta, where he earned his bachelor of music degree with honors in piano performance under Professor Alexandra Munn, then studied with Dr. Leonard Ratzlaff and earned his master's degree in choral conducting. He received his doctorate in instrumental and opera conducting from Indiana University, where his primary teachers were Imre Pallo and Thomas Baldner. His studies have included a summer at Vienna's Wiener Meisterkurs, where he worked under the tutelage of Bruno Weil.