Henry Cheng with Georgia’s Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra.
In Tuesday’s (6/24) ArtsAtl.org (Atlanta, Georgia), Jordan Owen writes, “There has been a wave of leadership upheavals throughout the Atlanta classical scene over the last few years…. That changing of the guard continues to cascade through various classical organizations, and, over the last year, the Johns Creek Symphony Orchestra has addressed the cavernous absence left by the death of its founder, J. Wayne Baughman. The search has ended with Henry Cheng, the highly acclaimed former chief conductor and artistic director of the Klangkraft Orchester in Duisburg, Germany. He returns to the States this year to accept the JCSO position along with the role of interim professor of orchestral conducting at Georgia State University. Such continent-hopping is a familiar experience for the man born Hao An Cheng, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan with his parents as a child…. Those formative experiences have guided Cheng’s cross-cultural musical mission. ‘At the forefront of my mind today is exactly that,’ he explains. ‘How do we connect to community? And what is my role in that?’… His first concert with the JCSO was an evening of symphonic K-Pop, where orchestral arrangements of modern South Korean pop standards merged with classical mainstays. It was an evening that meshed nicely with the JCSO’s penchant for blending the classical and the contemporary.”
