Xue Yuan is a young conductor and pianist born in 1988 in Shanghai.
He has been the Music Director of the Shanghai Rainbow Chamber Orchestra since 2012, and has led the Orchestra to perform classics like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, 5 and 7 to popular acclaim.
He entered the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 2007 to study Orchestral Conducting. His teachers included the Chinese-Australian conductor, Christopher Chen, and National Class One Conductor, Lin Yousheng. During his studies, he was handpicked to attend master classes given by conductors from China and overseas, such as Huang Xiaotong, Zheng Xiaoying, Bian Zhushan, Tang Muhai, Tsung Yeh, Lu Jia, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Michael Tilson Thomas. The orchestras he has collaborated with include the Shanghai Opera House Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, Zhejiang Chinese Orchestra, Zhejiang Symphony Orchestra, Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, Qingdao Symphony Orchestra, Chongqing Symphony Orchestra etc.
At the Second International Conducting Competition for Chinese Music held in July 2014, Xue won the first prize as well as three other major awards, a feat that also made him the first undergraduate to have won an international competition at the Shanghai Conservatory’s Department of Conducting.
Xue was selected for the first and second Master classes by International Conductors Series, organized by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in the autumn of 2012 and 2014, during which he received training and conducted the symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven under Jorma Panula and Thomas Sanderling respectively. In spring 2015, he was selected for the National Young Conductors Training Programme, in which he received training under Yu Feng and conducted the China National Opera House in performing works of Sibelius and Verdi’s La Traviata. As a pianist, Xue gave a solo recital at the Shanghai Concert Hall in January 2015, with a programme dedicated solely to Chopin’s works. It was followed by a solo performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at the He Luting Concert in May the same year.
