Pick Up the Baton

Award-winning Hong Kong conductor Lio Kuokman will blend classical orchestra music with Canto-pop in his Lunar New Year concert

Zabrina Lo

“I had no idea what an orchestra was when my mother brought me to a concert when I was four,” says Lio Kuokman, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra’s resident conductor. “I was intrigued by this man who came out looking like a penguin with a white stick in his hand. As he flicked his stick, I felt that the musicians were following his command, and sounds were coming out from different parts of the stage. I turned to my mother and said, ‘I want to be the guy with the chopstick’.”

Little did he know how far that dream of picking up the “chopstick” would take him. Proving to be a natural musician, Lio graduated from The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts in 2004 with first class honours, majoring in piano performance, then went on to study in the US at Juilliard, the New England Conservatory, and the Curtis Institute of Music, a private conservatory which accepts only about 30 of the 600 students that apply each year. He has conducted both the Philadelphia Orchestra, to which he was appointed assistant conductor at the age of 33, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. He also knows how to play the harpsichord, trombone and violin.