Joshua Tan

Conductor Joshua Tan is a fast-rising figure in East Asia, Australia, and the West, where he was partly trained. He is the principal conductor of the Singapore Youth Orchestra and associate conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Tan was born in Singapore. He used his full name, Joshua Kangming Tan, at the beginning of his career but later dropped the middle name. Tan took up the violin at age six, not out of any enthusiasm for the instrument but because his father had picked it. For some years, he continued with violin lessons purely out of family obligation, but when he was 14 or 15, he happened to listen to a recording of the Bruch and Dvořák violin concertos on a bus ride to a lesson and became mesmerized by them. Applying himself more energetically, he began to attend Singapore Symphony Orchestra concerts. Tan was admitted to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Realizing that he had been relatively late in taking up the violin seriously, he looked for a way to make himself stand out and decided to take up conducting as well. Tan graduated from Eastman and landed a seat in the Singapore Symphony in 2001, but he remained interested in conducting and found some conducting slots at summer festivals. In 2005, Tan attended a master class with conductor Charles Dutoit, who suggested that he enroll in the conducting program at the Juilliard School in Manhattan, New York. Despite warnings from Singapore Symphony conductor Lan Shui that he would have to be crazy to want to become a conductor, Tan took the advice; at Juilliard, he studied with James DePreist, and his other conducting teachers included Kurt Masur and David Zinman. Tan scored a breakthrough with a second prize at the 2008 Dimitri Mitropolous International Competition. Tan has appeared with leading orchestras in many countries, including the Mariinsky Theater Orchestra in Russia, the Tokyo Philharmonic and Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony in Japan, the China Philharmonic, and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, among others. He has a large repertory that encompasses a large range of symphonic works as well as major Italian and German operas and ballet. At home in Singapore, he is the principal conductor of the Singapore Youth Orchestra and associate conductor of the Singapore Symphony. His performances of Leonard Bernstein's Mass and of Donizetti's opera Don Pasquale were selected, respectively, as the best classical concerts of the year for 2018 and 2019 by the Straits Times newspaper. In 2023, Tan made his recording debut, joining conductor Mario Venzago on the Chandos label for a recording of music by Bernard Herrmann.
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