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Musicians
Music Director
Claude Lapalme is a Juno Award-winning conductor, as well as a noted arranger, orchestrator, and composer. He was born in Montreal in 1962 and trained at the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. Since his appointment as Music Director of the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra in 1990, Claude Lapalme has made his mark as a superb conductor and an outstanding Music Director. As he embarks on his 36th season as Music Director of the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra, he holds the distinction of having the third longest tenure as Music Director of a professional Symphony Orchestra in Canada.
As a conductor, Paris newspaper Le Figaro has called him “remarkable and superb”; the Toronto Globe & Mail, “assured and highly effective”; the Havana Granma, “surprisingly dexterous, warm and sincere”; the Edmonton Journal, “a breath of fresh air”; and the Calgary Herald, “vigorous and attentive to detail.” A 1991 Laureate of the Besançon International Conducting Competition, he has conducted orchestras around the world, including the Moscow Radio and Television Orchestra as well as numerous ensembles in Hungary, the United States, Cuba, France, the UK and the Netherlands.
His Canadian credits include the Edmonton Symphony, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Winnipeg Symphony, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Laval, the Hamilton Philharmonic, and numerous others. His own Red Deer Symphony has been featured on several CBC broadcasts, and has collaborated with, among others, Alberta Ballet, Edmonton’s Pro Coro, Calgary’s Early Music Voices, and Calgary’s Festival Chorus. The orchestra has also toured the province of Alberta as far north as Fort McMurray. Among the soloists with whom he has collaborated, we find names such as pianists Anton Kuerti and Mark Zeltser; tenor Benjamin Butterfield, violinists Andrew Dawes and Scott St. John; and cellists Denis Brott and Elinor Frey. He has conducted works of Sir Michael Tippett in his presence and conducted the Cuban premiere of a work by Leo Brouwer in collaboration with the composer.
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Mr. Lapalme has become an eminent orchestrator and arranger, having composed orchestra charts for the likes of Ian Tyson and Marvin Hamlisch. His arrangements, noted for the precision of their composition as well as their expressive lushness, have been performed by top Canadian, American, and Australian orchestras where they have been called “gorgeous” and “spine-chilling.” His orchestral arrangement of Ian Tyson’s Four Strong Winds, an exclusive composition for the Edmonton Symphony, was premiered to a standing ovation by an audience of over five thousand people. He also wrote five exclusive arrangements of Canadian popular songs for the Edmonton Symphony’s “Great Canadian Songbook” project. Canadian Tenor Ken Lavigne took his arrangements to Carnegie Hall, and some of his projects orchestrated for Marvin Hamlisch and tenor Alex Stein have been performed as far away as Australia.
​Claude Lapalme has been an instructor at both the Universities of Toronto and Calgary, and has also been a frequent clinician with various youth groups such as the Calgary Youth Orchestra. He has participated in the Quebec Youth Orchestra Festival, and is an adjudicator at various music festivals in Canada, as well as the Hong Kong Schools Music Festival, as recently as the spring of 2025. He is the founder of Choir Kids, a unique program that has elementary school choirs perform with the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra.
​Claude Lapalme is the grandson of the founder of Quebec’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs, George-Émile Lapalme.
For his achievements, Claude Lapalme has received recognition awards from both the City of Red Deer and the Government of Alberta. He resides in Red Deer with his ever beautiful wife, cellist Janet Kuschak.
Players