Now we know it!  The winner of the 11th International G. Fitelberg Competition for Conductors is a representative of China, Jong-Jie Yin, and he will conduct the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic during one of his post-competition concerts. The musicians will perform great works by Gioachino Rossini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonín Dvořák. Tomasz Daroch, an award-winning cellist well known to the audience of the National Forum of Music, will perform as a soloist.  

Due to Yin’s young age, his victory can be considered a sensation. He is only twenty-three years old, while the regulations of the Competition allow conductors up to 29 years of age. However, the age may be misleading here, because the winner of the competition has significant achievements to his credit. Already in 2021, he won a special prize at the prestigious conducting competition in Besançon. He is currently Assistant Conductor of the Chinese National Symphony Orchestra and has also had the opportunity to conduct other leading orchestras, such as the Orchestre national de Lyon, hr-Sinfonieorchester, and the Romanian Filarmonica George Enescu.

The opera La gazza ladra, whose overture will open Yin’s performance, was written by Gioacchino Rossini when he was only slightly older than Yin – at the age of twenty-five. Even though the plot suggests that the entire work should be assigned to the opera semiseria genre, the introduction evokes a genuienly comic mood with military drums and a dashing march at the beginning and a characteristic crescendo at the end. It took Rossini three months to write the entire opera. Mozart wrote the famous Symphony No. 36 in C major, KV 425 in just a few days during his short stay in Linz (hence the name Linz Symphony). He must have been surprised by the pace of his own work, as he wrote to his father: “On Tuesday, November 4, there will be an academy [concert] at the theatre, and since I haven’t brought a single symphony with me, I’m writing a new one at an alarming pace.” Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B minor, which will crown the evening, composed ten years before his death, is considered a summary of the composer’s work. You can hear there, for example, references to the Ninth Symphony in E minor “From the New World” – the work whose interpretation was presented by Yin in the second stage of the Katowice competition.