Kah-Ming Ng

Kah-Ming Ng is one of Malaysia’s more unusual public figures: a conductor, harpsichordist, musicologist, and public speaker whose work is internationally acclaimed for its imaginative combination of rigorous scholarship with panache in performance.

An unwitting (and unelected) cultural ambassador for his country, Kah-Ming’s œuvre is represented by the frequent inclusion in radio playlists around the world of many of his ensemble Charivari Agréable’s 22 critically acclaimed CD recordings as well as his concert and radio appearances around the globe, his performances being credited with ‘undoubted technical virtuosity and intellectual grasp’.

As a scholar he is a recognised authority on two of the most fundamental aspects of pre-Classical performance practice: firstly, musical ornamentation (on which he wrote two substantial entries on French and English Baroque ornamentation in the authoritative and definitive New Grove Dictionary of Music & Musicians); secondly, figured bass improvisation in its social and artistic contexts, being his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University.

Equally adept at retailing anecdotes which contextualise the music to be performed on stage or in front of a microphone (from the USA's National Public Radio to Hong Kong’s RTHK, but most regularly the BBC), Kah-Ming is a sought-after speaker on topics ranging from academic subjects (as a former lecturer at the Music Faculty of his alma mater Oxford University) to cross-disciplinary matters on creativity, leadership, enterprise, and artistic disruption in music (as a Visiting Professor at some universities) and even on authenticity in historically-informed performance (to the Association of British Choral Conductors).

The media—from the august Financial Times (which commissioned the first ever full-page feature of a Malaysian) to the glamorous magazine Tatler—often find Kah-Ming’s career trajectory fascinating. After gaining a B.E. in civil engineering (Monash University, Melbourne) and a short-lived career as a consultant engineer, he left for Europe supported by a prestigious DAAD scholarship at the Frankfurt State Academy of Music (Frankfurt Hochschule für Musik und darstllende Kunst), followed by, unusually, two Chevening awards for the London Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Oxford University’s St Anne’s College (M.Phil.) and Keble College (D.Phil.).

Kah-Ming has addressed many public institutions as well as private corporations, from universities, the sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional, to the London Lord Mayor’s Reflections. He has even been persuaded to appear as the brand ambassador for an haute couture production company.