Yan Huichang: conductor hitting all the right notes
Yan Huichang has spent 15 years breaking records with the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, and now hopes to spread his success in Taiwan
Exactly half a century ago, Yan Huichang was a peasant boy with a bamboo flute herding cows in Shaanxi, the northwest province of the yellow earth.
"I loved watching the deer come to a standstill and raise their ears when I played a note on the flute early in the morning," recalled the principal conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra since 1997.
Over the years, the bamboo flute has become a baton which the 58-year old maestro wields with increasing command.
His career features a long list of superlatives.
He was the first - and only - conductor to train in leading Chinese orchestras under an exclusive programme after the Cultural Revolution. His speciality saw him join Beijing's National Chinese Orchestra aged 29. Four years later, in 1987, he became the youngest Class One conductor among the veteran maestros in China.
After six years in senior music posts in Singapore and Taiwan as a composer-conductor, Yan joined the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra as music director just one month before the handover, making him the first conductor to have led major Chinese orchestras in so many parts of Greater China.