VC Artist Paul Huang to Join Taiwan Philharmonic on American Tour

The Taiwan Philharmonic and conductor Jun Märkl will perform across New York City, Chicago, and Washington D.C. from April 14–23, 2023

Known in Taiwan as the National Symphony Orchestra, the Taiwan Philharmonic (NSO) is one of the first international orchestras to be presented by the New York Philharmonic in David Geffen Hall in its return to the U.S. this spring. 

The NSO’s 2023 tour follows previous successful tours of the U.S. with violinist  Cho-Liang Lin in 2016, and with pianist Stephen Hough and violinist Yu-Chien Tseng in 2018. 

This year VC Artist violinist Paul Huang will join the NSO, and its music director Jun Märkl, for its David Geffen Hall debut on the tour’s last three days with Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy Op. 46. 

The tour starts on April 14, 2023, in Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, with a chamber music concert featuring members of the Taiwan Philharmonic & Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 

Performers for this concert will include violists Grace Huang and David Finckel; cellists Hsin-Yun Huang, Mihai Marica, and Ying-Chi Tang; violinists Danbi Um, Hao-Tun Teng, Chih-Hong Tseng, VC Artists Richard Lin and Stella Chen; plus pianist Wu Han, clarinetist Julian Chun-Yen Lai, and harpist Shannon Shuen Chieh. 

The tour will then continue to Washington D.C.'s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts presented by Washington Performing Arts on April 19, returns to New York City at David Geffen Hall as presented by the New York Philharmonic on April 21, and concludes at North Central College's Wentz Concert Hall on April 23.

The repertoire is wide-ranging on the tour, including two works by award-winning female Taiwanese composers that celebrate Taiwan’s diversity of cultures. Ke-Chia Chen’s Ebbs and Flows was co-commissioned by Washington Performing Arts and Muzik3 Foundation, Inc. and will see its U.S. premiere on April 19. Dr. Chen frequently collaborates with The Philadelphia Orchestra and is a faculty member of the Curtis Institute of Music. 

Yuan-Chen Li’s Tao of Meinong was commissioned by the Hakka Affairs Council, and will be performed on April 23. Li’s cross-cultural and cross-disciplined approach to music is inspired by ancient Chinese phonology; Taiwanese chamber and aboriginal music; and Asian traditional arts, literature, and Buddhism. 

The concert program across the tour also includes Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides Overture, Debussy’s La Mer, plus chamber works by Beethoven, Mozart, Caplet, and Shostakovich. 

A graduate of The Juilliard School, Paul is a former first-prize winner at the ​Tibor Varga International Violin Competition and the Young Concert Artists International Auditions. He was the 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient and received the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists in 2017. Paul performs on the 1742 Ex-Wieniawski Guarneri del Gesu, on an extended loan from the Stradivari Society of Chicago.

Founded in 1986, the NSO has been led by Märkl since January 2022. In the past thirty years, the orchestra has worked with conductors including Lorin Maazel, Rudolf Barshai, Sir Neville Marriner, Leonard Slatkin, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Christopher Hogwood, Osmo Vänskä, Long Yu, Nikolay Alexeev, Vassily Sinaiskyl, and Carl St. Clair. Performing nationally and abroad, the orchestra has also toured Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Milan, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, and Singapore among other cities.