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A big moment in conductor Carloyn Kuan’s career happened in May, when she led the New York premiere of Huang Ruo’s opera, An American Soldier, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center.
The opera, which premiered in its original version in 2014, recounts the true story of Danny Chen, a U.S. Army private who grew up in New York’s Chinatown, faced racial harassment and harsh bullying while serving in Afghanistan and ultimately committed suicide in 2011.
“The entire experience was very meaningful,” Kuan said. “I think projects like that are why I do what I do, trying to bring awareness to subject matter that can really connect with people and try to make a small difference in the world.”
“I think projects like that are why I do what I do, trying to bring awareness to subject matter that can really connect with people and try to make a small difference in the world.”
The 47-year-old music director of the Hartford (Connecticut) Symphony Orchestra will conduct more familiar repertoire July 28 when she makes both her Ravinia Festival and Chicago Symphony Orchestra debuts. She will lead Ravinia’s annual Tchaikovsky Spectacular, which will conclude with the traditional presentation of the Russian composer’s 1812 Overture, complete with cannons.
Is she looking forward to the double debut? “Who wouldn’t?” Kuan said with a laugh. “I mean, ‘Of course.’ I would say that I’m incredibly grateful. For any conductor to have a chance to work with the Chicago Symphony is a special moment.”
Also on the program will be the CSO’s first-ever presentation of the complete first act from The Nutcracker, Tchaikovsky’s beloved holiday ballet, and the composer’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, with soloist Desirée Ruhstrat. A member of the Chicago-based Lincoln Trio, she is also making her CSO debut. (As a sidenote, then-music director Theodore Thomas led the CSO’s American premiere of Op. 71a Suite from The Nutcracker at the Auditorium Theatre during the first concert of the ensemble’s second season on October 22, 1892.)
“My very first job was with the New York City Ballet, so ballet has a very special place in my heart,” Kuan said. She served as an artist-in-residence with the company, and has returned several times to conduct, including appearances Dec. 21-24, 2022, leading The Nutcracker.
Kuan grew up in Taipei, Taiwan, where she began taking piano lessons after her older brother received a piano for his birthday and she later sang in youth choirs. In the summer after seventh grade, she took part in an exchange program at Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Massachusetts, consisting of two weeks of English classes and a week of travel. In her first day of class in the United States, the teacher told the students to feel free to ask questions. “To you as an American,” she said, “it’s a standard thing that a teacher says. But for someone growing up in Taipei at the time, the Chines education system did not encourage you to ask questions. So, for me, it was like a light-bulb moment.”
Describing herself as “rebellious,” Kuan applied to the American school without her parents knowing, and, after a brief return to Taiwan later that summer, began classes at age 14 that fall. She has remained in the United States since, going on to become an American citizen. After graduation, she attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she pursued economics and computer science alongside music, thinking she would ultimately return home to pursue banking, which was her parents’ wish. “Music was the thing I loved but never thought I would do professionally,” she said.
She became interested in conducting at Smith, where, as a pianist, she began leading sectional choir rehearsals. To boost her work with the choir, an alumnus provided money for her and three other students to spend a summer auditing conducting classes at the Tanglewood Music Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts., and attending a conducting institute in Hartford. When she came back, she had chances to lead the school’s orchestra, which in turn led to a full scholarship to the University of Illinois, where she earned her master’s degree in conducting. She rounded out her education with an artist diploma from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore.
Kuan became music director of the Hartford Symphony in 2011, and it was only then that she finally realized that she would never move back to Taipei. “I think it took a long time to really understand what it means to be a conductor and the responsibility that you have, that this is what I want do for the rest of my life,” she said.
An important step in the conductor’s development took place in 2003, when she became the first recipient of what is now known as the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship. Marin Alsop, the Ravinia Festival’s chief conductor, founded the program in 2012 as a way to provide coaching and other career support for emerging female conductors. Thirty-six women have won various honors and awards through the Taki program, with the honorees becoming part of a kind of professional sorority, with each member supporting and guiding the other. Other notable alumni include Karina Canellakis (2013), chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, and Mei-Ann Chen (2007), music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta.
Along with the fellowship, Kuan also took part in two conducting workshops at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, California, where Alsop was music director for 25 years, ending her tenure in 2016. Kuan then went on to serve there as Alsop’s assistant through 2013. What began as a mentorship, Kuan said, has turned into a professional relationship and friendship. “And that has continued until today,” she said. Indeed, she is confident Marin played a major role in her coming to Ravinia.
“It’s been wonderful to have Marin to talk to about all sorts of things — life and conducting music — but it also means a tremendous opportunity to help support the next generation of Taki Fellowship winners, which has continued since,” she said. And, indeed, she will be on hand at Ravinia for the July 26-27 Breaking Barriers Festival, which will include a reunion of Taki winners.
In addition to her work at the Hartford Symphony, where her contract has been extended through 2027, and her symphonic guest conducting, Kuan also makes a point of delving into opera as she did in May. She had big operatic summer in 2022, when she led the world premiere of a new performing edition of Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis and the world premiere of Ruo’s M. Butterfly at the Santa Fe Opera. She will reprise the latter in October in a semi-staged production with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with some of the cast members and the stage director from Santa Fe.
But she tries to limit her opera productions to one or two a year, because of the time they take with weeks of rehearsals and performances. “I want to be careful,” she said. “It’s really important to me that I’m not one of those conductors who just flies from place to place. I really want to connect with the people I’m working with. And especially my job in Hartford, it’s really important that I serve the people here.”
Kuan professes not be concerned about what’s next for her. As important as her musical career is what she calls her spiritual journey of self-reflection and learning her place in the universe. “It sounds like a cliché,” she said, “but it’s about the power of now and being in the moment and taking care of your inner world and letting the other world take you to where it’s supposed to take you.”
