NHSO Announces New Music Director

The New Haven Symphony Orchestra has appointed conductor Perry So to be its next music director, beginning with the 2024 – 25 season.

“We are truly excited that Maestro So has agreed to join the NHSO as its music director,” said NHSO Board of Directors President Keith B. Churchwell in an official statement. ​“His ties to the New Haven area coupled with his expert musicianship and his great desire to invest in the New Haven community along multiple avenues will continue the work that has matured under Maestro Neale’s leadership over the past four years despite extremely challenging circumstances. We thank Alasdair for his wonderful work and residency with the Symphony and look forward in the coming years to Perry’s tenure with the NHSO!”

So (pictured at the top of the story) 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, from Hong Kong to St. Petersburg, with many points in between.

So was one of four final candidates — alongside Donato Cabrera, Tania Miller, and James Blachly — for the job after a search that began in 2021. Each of the conductors had a chance to develop and perform a concert with the NHSO this spring.

“I had such a wonderful week with the symphony in March,” So said. He knew many of the musicians in the orchestra but ​“had never had the chance to stand in front of them,” he said. ​“The level of musicianship is incredibly high.”

But, he added, ​“what was really moving for me — and really made me want the job — was that we were doing Beethoven’s third symphony, and there are 1,005 ways to do a symphony, but the openness of the musicians and their willingness to put aside inherited ideas about the piece was really wonderful,” he said. ​“I felt over the course of the week we were able to grow together.” Moreover, ​“at the concert, we ended up doing things we hadn’t rehearsed, on the spur of the moment,” he said. ​“At that moment I felt, ​‘these amazing musicians are willing to follow me anywhere.” Conducting the NHSO ​“would be not only an honor, but a fun gig.”

So takes the baton from current music director Alasdair Neale, who So credits with spearheading the orchestra’s embrace of a 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, as exemplified by the orchestra’s season-closing concert in June. Many in the classical music world, from heads of institutions to musicians and commentators, have talked about the need to make such a move; the NHSO is actually doing it.

“Alasdair has done more in five years than most of my colleagues have done in 10 or 15,” So said.

In March, he continued, ““I was so relieved, finally, to meet an institution that was facing this head-on, and trying really hard to not only give voice to great talents that have been excluded in the past, but to examine what we’re doing now” in light of a deeper understand for the past’s uncomfortable and sometimes hurtful legacy.

For So, ​“this has been kind of a lifelong battle for me,” he said. When he was growing up in Hong Kong, ​“classical music has been a European import for me from childhood.” He was asking himself questions about equity in classical music as a young person learning piano, organ, violin, viola, and composition. Even then, he noticed that ​“two-thirds of the people in the orchestra were Indian or Chinese” while all the music had been written by White men. ​“The disjointedness has been there from the beginning,” he said — and to a great extent, is still there.

In answer, 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. ​“How do you keep the tradition and canon and the inherited repertoire alive, with all the complications of that?” he asked. He noted that celebrated George Frideric Handel is ​“on the list of investors for a slave-owning company. Every time we play the Messiah, we need to be aware of this. But does that mean we throw it out?”

Reexamining the repertoire, in turn, means looking again at ​“what it means to be an American orchestra and to play in an American symphonic tradition,” So said.

He noted that, in comparison to Europe, the American tradition isn’t that old, and ​“there are some wonderful mavericks of different races and backgrounds who have been sidelined.… I hope that’s going to be one of the major narratives that we explore.” In using the programming to tell the story of the American symphony, he hopes to ​“join these dots from the beginning of American symphonic music” in the 1850s to the present that ​“I think have been underplayed.” With that approach, ​“I’d like to be able to draw connections and tell a different story than what other orchestras are telling.”

That story would include presenting works by Black, Latino, and Native American composers, in the process showing that classical music is itself more varied than listeners may have been led to believe. The richer understanding of history and exposure to a richer palette of musical ideas go hand in hand.

So will begin his new position in July 2024, and recognizes that he’s starting in a ​“pretty unique moment” — at a time when artists and audiences alike are interested in taking part in the same overall reckoning with history and figuring out how to move forward equitably and responsibly, with a clear-eyed view of the past. Classical musicians bear the weight of ​“inherited tradition,” So said, and ​“a lot of our audiences have certain expectations,” but he also believes ​“a large part of the audience are ready for a different kind of dialogue. It’s a moment to seize, and to see what we can do with it without leaving people behind.”

Such change and confrontation can be unsetlling, So acknowledged. ​“We’re still afraid, and that fear is probably rational,” he added with a laugh, ​“but I love that I’ve been given an opportunity with an institution that doesn’t seem afraid.”

That courage begins with the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra. In taking on new repertoire with limited rehearsal time, ​“there has to be a lot of trust that we can do justice to ” works the orchestra hasn’t played before, So said. ​“That’s part of the process of building an orchestra, that we build this common approach and discover the sound we want to make together,” then ​“applying it in concentric circles outward.”

For So, it also lies in getting that orchestra in front of new audiences. Right now the NHSO has three modes: its classical series, its pops series, and the concerts it performs in schools across the greater New Haven area. So would like to diversify the formats and venues of concerts as he diversifies the music being performed. 

“My conviction and my intention is to do as much as we can to move things forward for the whole New Haven community,” he said.