Welcome new Seattle Symphony music director with fanfare

Cue the applause: After a nearly three-year search, The Seattle Symphony has named Xian Zhang its next music director. When Zhang, 51, officially takes the stage, she will be one of only two women in the entire country leading a top-tier orchestra, according to The New York Times.

Firstly, the firsts: She will be SSO’s first female conductor. She will be the first person of color to lead the orchestra. She will be, according to the symphony, the first woman to lead a major West Coast orchestra. Zhang is the first woman to serve as music director of an Italian symphony orchestra and to hold a titled role with a BBC orchestra. Currently the music director of the New Jersey Symphony, Zhang will fill the gap left when former music director Thomas Dausgaard, appointed in the 2019-20 season, made an abrupt and unpleasant departure in 2022.

Conducting’s glass ceiling is more like the stuff that protects fans from flying hockey pucks. No matter who hits the slap shot, it usually bends instead of breaks. As with many positions of leadership, women weren’t thought of as capable enough to lead an orchestra with not only musicality but the gumption to suture the personalities into a whole, to command respect.

We like to think we’re in a time when “the first female this” and “the first person of color to do that” is passé; we want to be at the point where someone is exceptional not because they are an exception but because they excel. But there is no denying that like a woman behind the Resolute Desk, a woman at the podium of a large-budget orchestra is a rare bird. Symphonies are like NFL teams, where many of the players are Black but only painfully few head coaches are. While diversity in sex and in race is starting to increase in orchestras, sometimes those leading them do not reflect that.

Then there’s the travel. The hours. And, it was thought, only those who looked like Western composers should make their music. Conveniently for some, the system became a self-fulfilling prophecy: Few role models and mentors existed to lift up other women who could then land valuable experience as guest conductors and assistant conductors, build a reputation among orchestras and audiences. Rinse and repeat. You can’t network where there is no place to cast your net.

Zhang, however, is known here and has been welcomed. She first conducted the SSO in 2008 and was a keystone of the symphony’s streaming performances during the pandemic, when Dausgaard was tethered to Europe by travel restrictions. By all accounts, she’s a hit, winning accolades from reviewers and musicians alike. In an interview with The Times newsroom, SSO President and CEO Krishna Thiagarajan lauded Zhang’s “amazing musicianship, her clarity of technique, the way that she connects with the orchestra and with the audiences.” Patrons last saw her in April, but she’ll join the SSO for two weeks of performances in the 2024-25 season, which opened Sept. 14. Her current contract in New Jersey wraps up after the 2026-27 season.

It’s fitting that Seattle, long a forward-looking city, and Zhang have forged a five-year agreement. Zhang told The Associated Press she was “completely not prepared to hear such good news.” Symphony-goers, however, were. The rest of the region has reason to cheer the news and herald a new artistic era.