One of the most exciting Chinese conductors on the classical music scene today, Huang Yi is currently Music Director of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra (GSO) and Principal Conductor of the China Philharmonic Orchestra as well as Conductor Laureate of the Kunming Nie Er Symphony Orchestra.

In the 2023/2024 season, Huang Yi began his tenure as GSO Music Director. During the decade before his appointment, he garnered much acclaim conducting the GSO in dozens of symphonic works by Mahler, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky, Bernstein, Ding Shande, Qigang Chen, Tan Dun and others. Between 2023 and 2025, he conducted three successive GSO New Year Concerts. His inspiring creativity has not only been genuinely rejoined by GSO musicians but also received unanimous praise among cultural circles. During the calendar year of 2025—the 255th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth—Huang Yi will be completing the GSO’s “Forever Beethoven Series” at the Xinghai Concert Hall, featuring all nine symphonies and five piano concertos as well as the violin concerto, triple concerto, four overtures and Choral Fantasy in nine concerts, with various leading instrumentalists and vocalists.

Most recently, Huang Yi conducted such international ensembles as the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Frankfurt Symphony Orchestra, Seiji Ozawa Ongaku-Juku Symphony Orchestra and Busan Philharmonic Orchestra of Korea. He has also performed with leading orchestras in China, among them the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Shenzhen Symphony Orchestra, Hangzhou Philharmonic Orchestra, China NCPA Orchestra, Guiyang Symphony Orchestra, Macao Orchestra, Ningbo Symphony Orchestra, Chengdu Symphony Orchestra and Inner Mongolia Arts Theatre Orchestra, maintaining long-term working relationships with many. He has collaborated with numerous artists, including Leonidas Kavakos, Augustin Hadelich, Gautier Capuçon, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Stephen Hough, Julian Rachlin, Augustin Dumay, Matthias Goerne and Gerhard Oppitz, as well as all of the distinguished Chinese soloists and vocalists.

In 2012, Huang Yi was selected by Maestro Long Yu to make his opera debut conducting the China Philharmonic Orchestra in the 15th Beijing Music Festival’s new production of the Chinese original opera Savage Land by Jin Xiang. In 2013, he served as Christian Thielemann’s assistant conductor, rehearsing Parsifal at the Salzburg Easter Festival. Later that year, he assisted Gustav Kuhn in preparing the Chinese premiere of Parsifal at the Beijing Music Festival. Earlier, in 2009, he was personally selected by Maestro Seiji Ozawa to serve as his assistant conductor at the Seiji Ozawa Music Academy.

In 2015, Huang Yi led the world premiere of Andy Akiho’s Ping Pong Concerto (later entitled Ricochet) with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra at the closing concert of Shanghai’s Music in the Summer Air (MISA) festival. On China’s National Day in 2019, he was one of four conductors leading a 1,000-strong orchestra performing in Tiananmen Square. In 2022, Huang Yi conducted New Year Concerts of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (in Nanjing). In July 2023, he led the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in the MISA festival closing concert.

A graduate of the Central Conservatory of Music and the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler,” Huang Yi studied with Yang Li, Yu Feng, Christian Ehwald and Hans-Dieter Baum.