Orchestrating a prestigious career

During the two concerts with the China NCPA Orchestra, he also played Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's Two Portraits, and music piece Phaenomena with the sheng — a traditional mouth-blown free-reed instrument — by Austrian composer Bernd Richard Deutsch. The internationally renowned sheng virtuoso Wu Wei joined the concerts.

"Maestro Qian is talented, technically proficient and handles modern music with ease. His music is beautiful, grand, full of tension and passion," says Wu on Qian's performance. They worked together in Berlin, Germany, on the sheng concerto Yi Jing, a 2015 adaptation of the sheng concerto titled Changes (2003) by German composer Enjott Schneider.

"The interaction between the soloist, conductor and orchestra is like the awe-inspiring chase of thousands of troops on the grassland, occasionally interspersed with the agile calls of birds in the forest," Wu says.

Qian, from Anhui province and now based in Berlin, has a hectic schedule by working with symphony orchestras from home and abroad.

Before the two concerts with the China NCPA Orchestra, he conducted Schneider's opera Marco Polo at the Guangzhou Opera House in Guangdong province, an opera in which he worked closely with composer and director Kasper Holten from Denmark for its premiere in 2018.

In the 2023-24 season, he will debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the China National Symphony Orchestra.

Qian's music journey began in childhood when his parents had him study violin at 5 years old, believing it would improve their son's concentration. Later, he studied viola at the music middle school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.