Aug 8: Conductor Yue Bao Makes Debut with Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival

[Note: Photo of Yue Bao by Matt Genders available upon request. Yue Bao available for select interviews upon request.] 

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Contact: Christina Jensen, Jensen Artists
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Conductor Yue Bao Makes Debut with Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival

Music by Chen Yi, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky
Featuring Stella Chen, violin and Matthew Lipman, viola

Sunday, August 8, 2021 at 5pm
Ravinia Pavilion | Highland Park, IL | Tickets & Information: www.ravinia.org   

Read The New York Times’s recent feature including Yue Bao: www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/arts/music/orchestras-diversity.html 

Yue Bao: www.yuebaoconductor.com

Highland Park, IL – On Sunday, August 8, 2021, conductor Yue Bao will make her debut leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) at the Ravinia Festival in the Ravinia Pavilion. Bao was recently included in a feature in The New York Times, profiling young assistant conductors at top American ensembles. Her insightful program for Ravinia includes Chen Yi’s Duo Ye No. 1 for chamber orchestra, Mozart’s Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola featuring Stella Chen and Matthew Lipman, and Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 4 (“Mozartiana”).

Yue Bao currently serves as the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation Conducting Fellow of the Houston Symphony, assisting Music Director Andrés Orozco-Estrada. She made her subscription debut with the Houston Symphony on their opening night concert of the 2020-21 season, following a successful series of livestream concert performances with the orchestra throughout the summer of 2020. In addition to her debut with the CSO at Ravinia, highlights of the upcoming season include several engagements with the Houston Symphony on their summer concert series at the Miller Theater.

In May 2019, Yue Bao completed a two-year tenure as the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, working closely with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She has been active as both a conductor and assistant, working with conductors, Michael Tilson Thomas, Osmo Vänskä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Marin Alsop, David Robertson, Itzhak Perlman.

Bao says of her program with the CSO, “The arts are one of the best ways to build bridges between people and communities and I wanted to share music from across times and across cultures to form a program which was itself like a bridge. Chen Yi’s Duo Ye is influenced by a traditional song and dance of the Dong minority, and Tchaikovsky wrote the orchestral suite Mozartiana as a tribute to Mozart, whose Sinfonia concertante forms the center of the program with two fabulous soloists. In this way the pieces can share context despite being conceived across centuries and across traditions.” 

Yue Bao was the Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation Conducting Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2019. In 2018, she served as the David Effron Conducting Fellow at the Chautauqua Music Festival, where her concerts with the Festival Orchestra received accolades from audiences and the musicians. She participated in the online iteration of the 2020 Tanglewood Conducting Seminar.

Bao has worked extensively in the United States and abroad. In 2019, she toured China with the Vienna Philharmonic, assisting Andrés Orozco-Estrada. She served as an assistant for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta and David Lockington, making her conducting debut with the orchestra in 2016. Bao has also assisted Osmo Vänskä at the Minnesota Orchestra and Gilbert Varga at the St. Louis Symphony. Recent appearances include the Shanghai Opera Symphony Orchestra, the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, and the New Symphony Orchestra. Equally at home with both symphonic and operatic repertoire, she has conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Bizet’s Carmen, Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny: Ein Songspiel, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. She is also active as a pianist, recently playing for a production of Les contes d’Hoffmann  at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Along with her Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music, Bao holds Bachelors of Music degrees in orchestral conducting and opera accompanying from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music following her studies of composition and a Master of Music degree in orchestral conducting from the Mannes School of Music.

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