Perry So begins as music director of Connecticut’s New Haven Symphony Orchestra in the 2024-25 season.
In Thursday’s (7/20) New Haven Independent (CT), Brian Slattery writes, “The New Haven Symphony Orchestra has appointed conductor Perry So to be its next music director, beginning with the 2024-25 season…. So isn’t a stranger to New Haven. Born and raised in Hong Kong, he attended Yale as an undergraduate, where he studied literature, founded an orchestra, and conducted the undergraduate opera company. The NHSO was the first professional orchestra he heard in the U.S. He also met his wife, Anna Graber, here, and they lived here for 10 years while Graber got her PhD. So counts that his career started in New Haven—a career that has since taken him across the globe … ‘The level of musicianship [at the NHSO] is incredibly high,’ he says … So [succeeds] current music director Alasdair Neale, who So credits with spearheading the orchestra’s … forward-thinking, progressive stance on programming, one that expands the repertoire currently performed by most orchestras to include a diversity of composers from the past and a diversity of living composers … So doesn’t seek to burn the canon down, but to use the programming to interrogate the problems with it, and in the process, hopefully expand it.”
