Holly Hyun Choe, born in South Korea and raised in Los Angeles, impresses with presence and radiance on the podium. From September 2020, she served for two seasons as assistant conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra under the direction of Paavo Järvi. During this time, she has already conducted the Orchestre de Paris, the Basel Symphony Orchestra, and the Festival Orchestra of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival.
In the 2023/24 season, the up-and-coming conductor continues the series of exciting debuts, appearing with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Beethovenorchester Bonn, Musikalische Akademie Mannheim, Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, Spokane Symphony Orchestra, and Orchestre national de Cannes. Furthermore, she will work as an Artiste Associée with the Orchestre de Chambre de Genève for three years from the beginning of the season.
Holly Hyun Choe also has a close collaboration with the chamber orchestra Ensemble Reflektor, which has appointed her Principal Conductor in 2022 and sees itself as an ambassador of a borderless musical culture. In addition to their joint debut at the Beethovenfest Bonn in 2023, they will again give guest performances at the Elbphilharmonie as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and at the Alte Oper Frankfurt.
As part of her commitment to promoting women composers, Holly Hyun Choe regularly programs works by Clarice Assad, Grazyna Bacewicz, Lili Boulanger, Britta Byström, Louise Farrenc, Fanny Hensel, Jennifer Higdon, Jessie Montgomery, Emilie Mayer, Caroline Shaw, Ethel Smyth, Dobrinka Tabakova, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Galina Ustvolskaya.
Holly Hyun Choe recently completed her studies with Prof. Johannes Schlaefli at the Zurich University of the Arts. She began her musical journey self-taught: she learned to play the clarinet as a 13-year-old; she did not receive her first music lessons until she was 19. In 2015, she took a master’s degree with Prof. Charles Peltz at the New England Conservatory. She has attended master classes with Bernhard Haitink, Jorma Panula, Fabio Luisi (Concertgebouw Orkest), Peter Eötvös, Sylvia Caduff, and Jaap van Zweden, and has assisted Esa-Pekka Salonen (Orchestre de Paris), Leonard Slatkin (Orchestre national de Lyon), Simone Young (Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne/Opernhaus Zürich), François-Xavier Roth, and Karina Canellakis (Gürzenich-Orchester Köln).
In 2018, she was accepted into the German Music Council’s Forum Conducting grant; she has also been supported by a Solti Foundation Career Assistance Award, a Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, and as a participant in the Peter Eötvös Foundation Mentoring Program.