Milko Kersten is professor of ensemble work, acting musical director of the opera class, and member of the board of trustees at the Hochschule für Musik Dresden, where he had previously been a lecturer since 1996.
He was a member of the Dresden Kreuzchor and studied conducting, choral conducting, singing, and piano at the Dresden Musikhochschule. After a stint in Zwickau as principal conductor and acting chief conductor, he returned to Dresden, where he has since worked with various orchestras and ensembles, including the Collegium Marianum Prague, the Elbland Philharmonic, and the Dresden Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. He maintains a particularly close artistic collaboration with the Sinfonietta Dresden, with which he devotes himself primarily to contemporary music and curates entire concert series.
Milko Kersten has been working as an orchestra teacher at the Heinrich-Schütz-Konservatorium Dresden for over 25 years. He is also a freelance conductor and has been President of the Sächsischer Musikrat (Saxon Music Council) since 2019. For 20 years, he led the Landesjugendorchester Sachsen and performed with this youth ensemble worldwide. CD recordings and radio broadcasts testify to the quality of this long-standing work. From 2010, he was head of Chorus 116 for a decade, where he passionately cultivated the choral-symphonic repertoire.
As Musical Director of the Serkowitzer Volksoper, he is co-musical director of an independent opera company that has been staging a production every summer for over 15 years and was named Association of the Year in 2018 by the Ostsächsische Sparkasse and the Sächsische Zeitung.
Whether as a juror for "Jugend musiziert" or as the director of conducting courses for the Bundesverband Deutscher Liebhaberorchester e.V. (BDLO) – amateur music-making is an important concern for him.
Since 2023, he has been a member of the Facharbeitsgruppe Musik (Music Working Group), and since October 2024, he has also been deputy chairman of the Kulturbeirat of the state capital Dresden. In May 2021, he was appointed to the board of trustees of the Europa Chor Akademie Görlitz. Since 2022, he has been a jury member of the Akademie des Kammermusikfestes Oberlausitz and the Fachbeirat Orchester of the Deutscher Musikrat.