Conductor Yue Bao makes debut with Chicago Symphony at Ravinia

At 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 8, conductor Yue Bao will make her debut leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival in the Ravinia Pavilion.

Bao was recently included in a feature in The New York Times profiling young assistant conductors at top American ensembles. Her insightful program for Ravinia includes Chen Yi's Duo Ye No. 1 for chamber orchestra, Mozart's Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola, featuring Stella Chen and Matthew Lipman, and Tchaikovsky's Suite No. 4, "Mozartiana."

Yue Bao currently serves as the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation Conducting Fellow of the Houston Symphony, assisting Music Director Andrés Orozco-Estrada. She made her subscription debut with the Houston Symphony on their opening night concert of the 2020-21 season, following a successful series of livestream concert performances with the orchestra throughout the summer of 2020.

In addition to her debut with the CSO at Ravinia, highlights of the upcoming season include several engagements with the Houston Symphony on their summer concert series at the Miller Theater.

In May 2019, Yue Bao completed a two-year tenure as the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, working closely with Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

"The arts are one of the best ways to build bridges between people and communities, and I wanted to share music from across times and across cultures to form a program which was itself like a bridge," Bao says of her program with the CSO.

Bao has worked extensively in the United States and abroad. In 2019, she toured China with the Vienna Philharmonic, assisting Andrés Orozco-Estrada. She served as an assistant for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta and David Lockington, making her conducting debut with the orchestra in 2016.

She is also active as a pianist, recently playing for a production of "Les contes d'Hoffmann" at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Along with her Artist Diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music, Bao holds Bachelors of Music degrees in orchestral conducting and opera accompanying from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music following her studies of composition, and a Master of Music degree in orchestral conducting from the Mannes School of Music.

For tickets and information, visit www.ravinia.org.