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Xian Zhang is leading the Seattle Symphony into an exciting new chapter. Photo: James Holt
When Xian Zhang stepped onto the podium as music director of the Seattle Symphony in September, she made history as the first woman to lead the orchestra in its 120-year history. Before setting foot on the stage locally, Zhang built an impressive international conducting career, regularly guest conducting many of the world’s leading orchestras. A talented maestro, those familiar with Zhang’s work praise her dynamic, emotionally charged style and meticulous ear.
As she leads the Seattle Symphony, her passions for exploring diverse musical styles while creating performances that resonate with audiences will guide her tenure.
Your relationship with music began long before you stepped onto a podium. Can you share what music meant in your childhood, how your family and cultural heritage shaped the artist you became?
My parents started teaching me the piano as early as possible. My first memory was sitting on my mom’s lap playing a pedaled organ. She was doing the pedaling with her feet as I couldn’t reach it. I just tried to place my fingers on the keyboard. I was 2 years old, I think. From a very young age, music became a part of my blood and my identity, inseparable.
How did your early experiences as a young musician and as a girl shape the way you lead today?
My upbringing was very strict and very disciplined. My parents had high expectations for me regardless of [whether] I was a girl or a boy. I learned that there’s this wildly accepted social norm of the double standard to gender much later in life. It was to my surprise actually.
For a child sitting in the audience for the first time, what do you hope they feel and think when the orchestra begins to play?
I hope they’ll sense a sonic magic happening right before their eyes.
In a world of constant stimulation and shortened attention spans, what does symphonic music train in a young mind that no other experience quite can?
Two things: to enhance imagination and to increase shared human emotional experience. As AI and other technologies advance further, our best assets are the human abilities to imagine and to feel.
If you could conduct one piece for your younger self, the child who first fell in love with music, what would it be and why?
I would pick “Swan Lake” by Tchaikovsky because it was our wake-up alarm in the loudspeaker at my boarding music school for six years. I’d like to make a beautiful rendering of it. Not the broken vinyl that woke me up every morning. It was something I thought I hated, but as I grow older, I realize that I was just not happy with the recording; I actually love the music.
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