Carolyn Kuan

Carolyn Kuan is a conductor who serves as music director of the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, where she leads a full season of subscription concerts, holiday programs, and choral works. Her upcoming Hartford programs pair American composers like Barber and Ives-adjacent figures such as Parker with core European repertoire, and one 2027 concert is billed as her farewell finale with the orchestra.

Across these Hartford programs, expect a mix of large orchestral color and intimate contrast. The Schweitzer Organ Festival concert sets Horatio Parker's organ concerto and Barber's brooding Essay No. 1 against the blazing organ-and-orchestra showpiece Toccata Festiva, so listen for the pipe organ's low pedal tones shaking the hall against the strings. The New World program moves from a new violin concerto by Howard through Strauss's lyrical horn writing to Dvořák's "New World" symphony, with its famous melody first heard in the English horn. Later programs bring Brahms's German Requiem, sung in German with a chorus, and a season finale pairing Tchaikovsky's virtuosic violin concerto with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, a symphonic suite that gives the concertmaster's violin its own storytelling role as the character Scheherazade herself.