ZHENG XIAOYING

b. 1929, Yongding, Fujian

Conductor, music educator

Zheng Xiaoying began her music career in the early 1950s and has been the best-known female conductor for half a century. She was once the chief conductor of the National Central Opera Theatre and Director of the Conducting Department at the China Music Academy. She initiated the idea of a women’s philharmonic, establishing the Beijing Women’s Philharmonic Orchestra at the beginning of the 1990s. She also founded the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, which was organized in 1998.

In 1952, Zheng Xiaoying became a student, pursuing composition courses at the China National Central Academy of Music. She learned to be a chorus-conductor from N.Dumashev, the teacher of Veronica Doudarova, the first female conductor in the world and People’s Artist of the USSR. In 1960, Zheng Xiaoying went to the USSR to study at the Tchaikovsky Music Institute, majoring in philharmonic-conducting.

As a conductor, Zheng Xiaoying’s artistic activities won recognition in musical circles both in China and abroad. She was well known for conducting Puccini’s Tosca at the Russian National Musical Theatre in Moscow in 1962. Around 1978, she conducted a number of influential performances of Chinese and foreign operas, including The God of Flowers, La Traviata, Carmen, Le Nozze di Figaro and Madam Butterfly. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Zheng Xiaoying’s repertoire has included the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev, and some of the finer Chinese symphonies.