Yiran Zhao

Conductor, composer, pianist, and soprano Yiran Zhao was a 2025 Conducting Fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she conducted in 15 concerts leading the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, vocal fellows, and chamber ensembles through a variety of repertoire including Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 and L’enfant et les sortilèges, Béla Bartók’s Dance Suite, Carlos Simon’s Four Black American Dances, and several world premieres. She will make her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a subscription concert shared with Music Director Andris Nelsons in April 2026, and with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s Mendelssohn Academy in June 2026. 

As a composer, Zhao is published by Hinshaw Music Inc. and was a national winner of the 2024 American Prize for Composition. Her music has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia, and she continually receives commissions. She has held assistant conductor roles with the Civic Orchestra of New Haven and the Greater New Haven Community Chorus, in addition to serving as a church organist and music director for five years. 

Zhao holds a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from Yale School of Music, where she was a Robert Shaw Prize recipient, served as a conducting instructor, and performed as a conductor, pianist, and singer in the New Music New Haven series. She holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano and Theory & Composition from Westminster Choir College. She is currently a Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Jim Ross and assisting various orchestras and Curtis Opera productions. During the 2024–25 season, she taught courses in Music Theory and Conducting at the Eastman School of Music and served as assistant conductor of Eastman Musica Nova under the mentorship of Brad Lubman, with a focus on contemporary music. She has participated in summer programs directed by Gerard Schwarz and Neil Varon.

Born and raised in China, Zhao began playing the piano at age four and joined the Beijing Philharmonic Choir at age eight, singing with the ensemble for ten years. She is currently a soprano with the Grammy®-winning Apollo’s Fire and The Crossing, and was a VOCES8 US Scholar during the 2023–24 season. She currently serves as staff pianist at the University of Pennsylvania. A dedicated music educator, Zhao taught choir and piano at ACES Educational Center for the Arts, a magnet high school in New Haven, and was a post-graduate fellow at the Yale Music in Schools Initiative, where she served as director of the All-City Choir.

More information is available at www.zhaoyiranmusic.com .