“The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s next music director will be familiar to some concertgoers in the region: the orchestra announced Monday that the role would be filled by Xian Zhang, a rising Chinese-American star who was an associate conductor at the New York Philharmonic for several years before concentrating her recent career in Europe,” writes Michael Cooper in Tuesday’s (11/17) New York Times. “Ms. Zhang—whose full name is pronounced she-YEN jhong—has been the music director of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi since 2009, and has been a guest conductor with a number of prestigious orchestras around the world… In New Jersey she will succeed Jacques Lacombe, who plans to step down in June after a six-year tenure with the orchestra and who will become the principal conductor of the Bonn Opera in Germany this spring. Ms. Zhang will begin her four-year contract as music director in September, but will be heard there before that: in April she will lead the orchestra, which she has conducted before, in Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Barber’s Violin Concerto.” Born and educated in China, Xian Zhang shared first prize in the inaugural Maazel/Vilar Conductors’ Competition at Carnegie Hall in 2002.
Xian Zhang photo by Benjamin Ealovega
Posted November 17, 2015
