Music Director - Jerome Hoberman
Conductor, teacher, lecturer and radio personality, Jerome Hoberman is among the leading musical personalities in Asia. As Music Director and Conductor of The Hong Kong Bach Choir & Orchestra since 1992, he is praised by critics as an artist whose “sure authority [and] attention to rhythmic precision and dynamic shading produced excellent results.” Ensembles he has guest-conducted include the Hong Kong Sinfonietta, the Shanghai Philharmonic, the Shanghai, South Bend and Washington Idaho symphonies and Cincinnati's Immanuel Opera, resulting in frequent re-invitations and offers of permanent posts. For the past several seasons he has made annual appearances in the Shanghai International Spring Festival, and during the 2007-08 season made highly successful European débuts in Romania (Muntenia Philharmonic of Targoviste) and Ukraine (Ukraine State Symphony in Kiev), to which he was immediately invited to return. Hoberman's previous music directorships include the Hong Kong Chamber Orchestra and the Nittany Valley Symphony Orchestra in Pennsylvania. He created The Hong Kong Bach Orchestra in 1995 as a fully-professional partner of The Bach Choir.
A strong advocate of new and unusual music, with an eclectic repertoire, Hoberman has given many significant premières, introducing the music of the distinguished Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski to the Peoples Republic of China and of the eminent Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola to Kiev, leading the first Shanghai performance of Chen Pei-xun's Ode to the Snow and Asian or Hong Kong premières of works by Dallapiccola, Górecki, Harbison, Honegger, Janácek, Larsen, Orff, Pärt, Satie, Schnittke, Tavener, Tippett and Vaughan Williams, among others. In Shanghai he led the PRC premières of Poulenc's Concert champêtre and Dragonetti's Double Bass Concerto – the first performances of music for harpsichord and for double bass with orchestra in that city. In Hong Kong he has directed world premières of music by local composers Ip Kim Ho, Joyce Tang, Christopher Coleman, Christopher Keyes and David Francis Urrows, and the revival of George Chadwick's The Angel of Death , an important American symphonic poem unheard since its 1919 première. Hoberman's performance with The Bach Choir and Orchestra of Tippett's A Child of Our Time was Hong Kong's principal commemoration of the Tippett centennial in 2005, and in 2006 he gave the Hong Kong première of Honegger's biblical oratorio Le Roi David as part of the city's annual spring festival of French culture.
In recent years Hoberman has increased his work with training orchestras, including the Hong Kong Youth Symphony, the Metropolitan Youth Symphony of Hong Kong and the Wan Fang Youth Symphony, based at Shanghai Normal University. From 1992 to 2000 he was director of the Hong Kong Baptist University Orchestra (which he re-established after a hiatus of several years) and, previously, of the University of Notre Dame Orchestra in the United States. He has also taught at the universities of Hong Kong and Wisconsin, and established a Conductor Apprentice Program under the auspices of The Bach Choir, which has trained several talented young artists to take leading roles in the musical lives of Hong Kong and Macau.
Born in New Jersey, Hoberman attended school in Manhattan. He holds degrees from Brandeis University, the University of Wisconsin and the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a doctorate with a dissertation on the American composer Roger Sessions. He was a conducting fellow of the Aspen Music Festival, and studied additionally at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, in Siena, Italy and Hilversum, Holland. His teachers include Sergiu Celibidache, Igor Markevitch, Jean Fournet and Georg Solti.