Perry So will close the 2025/26 season of the Navarra Symphony Orchestra, his fourth season as principal conductor and artistic director, with Brahms’s A German Requiem. The performance will feature soprano Erika Baikoff and baritone Birger Radde as soloists, and the Orfeón Pamplonés will also participate. The concerts will take place on May 28 and 29 at 7:30 p.m. in the Baluarte Auditorium in Pamplona. Perry is also the music director of the New Haven Symphony, with which he is currently completing his second season.
Perry So
Perry So was born in 1982 in Hong Kong, where he received early musical training in piano, organ, violin, viola, and composition. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in Literature, specializing in Central European music and literature of the modernist period, during which time he founded an academic orchestra and directed the university’s opera company. He initially studied conducting with James Sinclair and later with Gustav Meier at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. In 2008, Perry received First Prize and a Special Prize at the 5th International Prokofiev Conducting Competition in St. Petersburg. Following this recognition, he was appointed Assistant Conductor and then Associate Conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel Conducting Fellow at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Artistic Collaborator with the Principality of Asturias Symphony Orchestra, and a member of the Conducting Department at the Manhattan School of Music.
In recent seasons, Perry So made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and his European operatic debut with the Royal Danish Opera in The Magic Flute. Other notable performances include a tour of Italy with the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra and a seven-week tour of South Africa leading three different orchestras, during which he conducted Verdi’s Requiem. Other debuts in recent years include appearances with the Cleveland and Minnesota Orchestras, the symphony orchestras of Navarre, Tenerife, Nuremberg, Israel, New Zealand, Houston, Detroit, New Jersey, and Shanghai, the London, Szczecin, Malaga, Seoul, and China Philharmonic Orchestras, the Residentie Orkest of The Hague, and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie Koblenz. He led a tour of the Balkan Peninsula with the Zagreb Philharmonic and, more recently, conducted the Wuppertal Orchestra in both symphonic and operatic repertoire, including Mozart’s Don Giovanni. He also conducted La Traviata at the Baluarte Auditorium and the Kursaal in San Sebastián.
His studio work encompasses a wide range of 20th-century British, French, and Russian music with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and his album of Barber and Korngold violin concertos with Alexander Gilman and the Cape Town Philharmonic received the Diapason d’Or in 2012. His broad musical interests include numerous world premieres on four continents, as well as the reintroduction of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire into symphonic programs, notably championing the works of Jean-Philippe Rameau. His work with young musicians has taken him to the Australian Youth Orchestra, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada, the Round Top Festival, the Manhattan School of Music, the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, and the Yale School of Music.