Perry So conducts the New Haven Symphony Orchestra‘s fourth subscription concert on Sunday 22 February at Wolsey Hall. The programme includes Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, with Augustin Hadelich as soloist, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Pastoral, and the contemporary work Inscription, by Raven Chacón. A week later, on 26 and 27 February in Pamplona and Tudela respectively, and on this occasion with Javier Perianes as soloist, he returns to conduct the Navarra Symphony Orchestra with a programme that includes García Leoz’s Sonatina, Ravel’s Concerto in G and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
Perry So was born in 1982 in Hong Kong, where he received his early training in piano, organ, violin, viola and composition. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in literature, specialising in Central European music and literature of the modernist period, during which time he founded an academic orchestra and conducted the university’s opera company. He studied conducting initially with James Sinclair and later with Gustav Meier at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. In 2008, Perry received First Prize and the 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 of the Principado de Asturias Symphony Orchestra, and member of the Conducting Department at the Manhattan School of Music. He is currently music director of the Navarra Symphony Orchestra, where he recently extended his contract, and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra.
In recent seasons, Perry So has made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony, as well as his operatic debut in Europe with the Royal Danish Opera and The Magic Flute. Notable performances include an Italy tour with the Nuremberg Symphony and a seven-week South Africa tour conducting 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 Navarra, Tenerife, Murcia, Nuremberg, Israel, New Zealand, Houston, Detroit, New Jersey and Shanghai; the London, Szczecin, Málaga, Seoul and China philharmonic orchestras, the Residentie Orkest in The Hague and the Staatsorchester Rheinische Philharmonie in Koblenz. In 2013, he toured the Balkan Peninsula with the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra in the first series of cultural exchanges established after the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Perry So’s recording 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 wide-ranging musical interests include numerous world premieres on four continents, as well as the reintroduction of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire into symphonic programmes, particularly 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 for Performing Arts, and the Yale School of Music.