Holly Hyun Choe
Conductor

Holly Hyun Choe, born in South Korea and raised in Los Angeles, impresses with her presence and radiance on the podium. She is recipient of the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award 2025 and designated chief conductor of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (KORK), with whom she will give her inaugural concert in January 2026 with Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony. In October 2025, Orchestre national de Cannes has appointed her new directrice musicale with the beginning of the 2026/27 season.

A sought-after guest conductor in both the United States and Europe, Holly Hyun Choe will make her debut with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and the Gürzenich Orchestra this season. She will also make her first appearance before Korean audiences with the Gyeonggi Philharmonic Orchestra in April 2026 as part of the Seoul Arts Centre Orchestra Festival. Other highlights of the season include subscription concerts with the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra and her final concert as Artiste associée with the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève – in this role, she conducted Gerald Barry’s opera Alice’s Adventures Under Ground at the Grand Théâtre de Genève last season.

A significant debut in her hometown Los Angeles stands out among her engagements in the past seasons: As a Dudamel Fellow, Holly Hyun Choe conducted the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the first time in May 2025. She also returned to the Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Orchestre de Paris and the Kammerakademie Potsdam, and was a guest with other prestigious orchestras, among them Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Estonian National Symphony Orchestra.

As part of her commitment to promoting female composers, Holly Hyun Choe regularly programmes works by Clarice Assad, Grażyna Bacewicz, Lili Boulanger, Britta Byström, Louise Farrenc, Fanny Hensel, Jennifer Higdon, Jessie Montgomery, Caroline Shaw, Dobrinka Tabakova, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Galina Ustvolskaya. She recorded Ethel Smyth’s Serenade for the album Lauter together with the Ensemble Reflektor, where she served as principal conductor for three years.

Holly Hyun Choe completed her studies with Prof. Johannes Schlaefli at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2023. Her musical journey began self-taught: she learned to play the clarinet at the age of 13 and only received her first private music lessons at the age of 19. In 2015, she completed a master’s degree with Prof. Charles Peltz at the New England Conservatory. She has participated in master classes with Bernhard Haitink, Jorma Panula, Fabio Luisi, Peter Eötvös, Sylvia Caduff, and Jaap van Zweden, and has assisted Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Simone Young, François-Xavier Roth, and Karina Canellakis before spending two years as assistant conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra under Paavo Järvi.

In 2018, she was selected for the German Music Council’s Forum Dirigieren; she has also been supported by a Career Assistance Award from the Solti Foundation, a scholarship from the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, and as a participant in the Peter Eötvös Foundation Mentoring Programme.