Xian Zhang

Xian Zhang is a Chinese born American conductor who has led the New Jersey Symphony as music director since 2016 and works regularly with major orchestras in the United States and Europe. She built her career on the big Romantic repertoire, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, alongside a steady commitment to new music. Listeners can expect clear, propulsive playing and a conductor who shapes long pieces so the arrival points land. Her directory dates cluster heavily in Seattle, where she appears throughout the 2026 to 2027 season.

Zhang conducts from memory much of the time, and it shows in how closely she watches players rather than pages. Her tempos tend to move; she likes a piece to feel like it is going somewhere, and she is careful that the loudest moment of a symphony is saved rather than spent early. The Seattle programs show her range: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, where an idea for a beloved woman keeps returning in disguise until it becomes a witches' dance, then Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra with its famous sunrise of trumpets and organ, then Mozart's Requiem, unfinished at his death in 1791. In San Francisco she pairs Kodály's Hungarian dance tunes with Dvořák's Eighth Symphony, a piece full of birdsong and brass fanfares.

Xian Zhang was born in Dandong, China, in 1973 and trained at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she conducted a production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro while still a student and later joined the faculty. She moved to the United States and in 2002 won the Maazel Vilar Conductor's Competition, which led to a position with the New York Philharmonic, where she served as associate conductor and held the Arturo Toscanini chair. From 2009 she was music director of the Giuseppe Verdi Symphony Orchestra in Milan. She became principal guest conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the first woman to hold a titled post with a BBC orchestra, and in 2016 took up the music directorship of the New Jersey Symphony. She has also held a principal guest conductor post with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.