Huang Yijun (; 4 May 1915 – 11 October 1995; pen name: 元之; pinyin: Yuán Zhī) was a Chinese conductor and

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

. Born in

Suzhou Suzhou (; ; Suzhounese: ''sou¹ tseu¹'' , Mandarin: ), alternately romanized as Soochow, is a major city in southern Jiangsu province, East China. Suzhou is the largest city in Jiangsu, and a major economic center and focal point of trade ...

into a musical family, Huang exhibited great musical talent from a young age. His father, a strict man, taught him organ and violin, and Huang taught himself a variety of Chinese and Western instruments, including piano, harmonica, erhu,

yangqin The trapezoidal yangqin () is a Chinese hammered dulcimer, likely derived from the Iranian santur or the European dulcimer. It used to be written with the characters 洋琴 (lit. "foreign zither"), but over time the first character changed ...

, jinghu, yueqin and even Beijing and Kun Opera. He moved to Shanghai in the mid-1930s, where he joined in orchestral recordings for the

Pathé Pathé or Pathé Frères (, styled as PATHÉ!) is the name of various French people, French businesses that were founded and originally run by the Pathé Brothers of France starting in 1896. In the early 1900s, Pathé became the world's largest ...

label. In 1938, he joined the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, and after the founding of the People's Republic of

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, became the head of the orchestra in 1953. He recorded a number of film-scores, and accepted invitations to conduct symphonies in Finland (1956), the USSR (1958) and, at the invitation of Herbert Von Karajan in 1981 Berlin. He was persecuted and removed from his position in the so-called Cultural Revolution.

References

20th-century conductors (music) 1915 births 1995 deaths Chinese conductors (music) Musicians from Jiangsu Musicians from Shanghai 20th-century Chinese musicians {{conductor-stub

See also

References