Conductor LÜ Jia has received great acclaim internationally. Born into a musical family in Shanghai, LÜ began studying piano and cello at a very young age. He later studied conducting at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, under the tutelage of esteemed conductor ZHENG Xiaoying. At the age of 24, LÜ entered the University of the Arts in Berlin, where he continued his studies under Professor Hans Martin Rabenstein and Professor Robert Wolf. The same year, he was awarded both the First Prize and Jury’s Prize at the Antonio Pedrotti International Conducting Competition in Trento, Italy, and launched his career as a conductor.
Over the past decades, he has conducted over 2,000 orchestral concerts and opera performances in Europe, America and other places around the world, and became the first Asian conductor to serve as the director of a major Italian opera house, as well as the first Chinese conductor to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with important productions at La Scala in Milan,the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, and the Deutsche Oper Berlin, as well as opera houses in Lausanne, Turin, Rome, Naples,Venice, Florence, Frankfurt and Stuttgart.He has also worked with many renowned orchestras including the Concertgebouworkest, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Münchner Philharmoniker, Bamberg Symphoniker, Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Oslo Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon in France, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and many others across Europe, America and Australia.
LÜ Jia was the first Chinese conductor to record Felix Mendelssohn’s complete symphonic works, and also the only conductor so far who has recorded the complete symphonies by the important Swedish composer Ingvar Lidholm. His interpretations of German Romanticism and French Impressionism works have been praised for their “extremely convincing musical interpretation" with "musical precision and perfect baton technique”. Having directed over 50 operas in Italy and Germany, homelands of the European opera tradition, he has also been praised by Italian music critics as “a conductor who understands Italian opera even better than the Italians do”.
In 2007, his performance of La Gazza Ladra at the Rossini Opera Festival in Pesaro was voted as the European Opera Production of the Year. That same year, in recognition of his important contribution to musical culture in Italy, LÜ Jia was awarded the President’s Prize by President Giorgio Napolitano. In 2012, the Domingo International Vocal Competition invited LÜ Jia to serve on the jury, making him the Competition’s first-ever Chinese jury member.
In 2012, LÜ Jia was appointed Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of Opera at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Beijing, China. In 2017, LÜ Jia has been appointed as the Artistic Director of Music of the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) of China, Music Director of the China NCPA Orchestra. Before taking up his current posts in Beijing, LÜ served as Music Director at Arena di Verona in Italy, Artistic Director at Symphony Orchestra of Tenerife in Spain, as well as Chief Conductor at Italy’s Teatro Comunale Giusseppe Verdi di Trieste, Florence Symphony Orchestra, Lazio Chamber Orchestra of Rome and Norrköping Symphony Orchestra in Sweden. In addition to his NCPA music directorship, he is also currently the Music Director and Principal Conductor of Macao Orchestra.
