Czech Philharmonic • Xian Zhang

Who hasn’t heard of the folktale collection A Thousand and One Nights? And is there anyone who does not know about the wise storyteller who survived her struggle against evil cruelty? Sultan Shahryār, being convinced that women are deceitful and unfaithful, marries a virgin every day, then each time he has her beheaded the morning after their wedding night. After three years of this horrible barbarism, Scheherazade offers herself voluntarily to be the cruel sultan’s wife, and she asks his permission to tell him a story in the evening. At dawn, her storytelling full of mystery, magic, and adventure has not finished, and because the sultan is curious about how the story will continue, he must postpone the execution. After a period of a thousand and one nights, the beautiful girl Scheherazade not only saves her life in this way, but also manages to soften the heart of the cruel ruler entirely. The sultan finally realizes that by her wisdom, faithfulness, and love, Scheherazade has not only saved herself, but also prevented him from carrying out further acts of evil. It is the sultan’s transformation that constitutes the beautiful finale of the entire four-movement composition that the Russian composer Nikola Rimsky-Korsakov wrote in 1888, giving it the title Scheherazade, a symphonic suite for orchestra, Op. 35. The composer himself conducted the successful premiere in Saint Petersburg that same year. By then, he was already a famed and respected artist who was most strongly drawn to subject matter from folk literature and especially from fairy tales.

In real life, the difficult path Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov had to follow to fulfil his dreams was like something from a fairy tale. At age 20, he enrolled at a school for naval cadets in Saint Petersburg, and after graduation he sailed around the world on the school’s clipper. In his memoirs, he wrote about the experience in detail, and after his happy return, he evaluated it as follows: “My voyage of foreign seas had ended. From that voyage, which lasted two years and eight months, I came away with many unforgettable memories of the natural beauty of faraway lands and seas and with many negative, harsh, and revolting impressions from naval service. And what is there to say about music and my desire for it?” Fortunately, a much longer section of his memoirs deals with music, and especially with his unique output as a composer.

Just like the collection of Oriental fairy tales, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s four-movement orchestral suite is full of mystery, magic, and adventure. It begins with a unison fortissimo theme depicting the cruel sultan. Next, we here a violin solo that, according to the composer, “depicts Scheherazade herself as if she were telling her wonderful tales to the terrible sultan.” Scheherazade’s theme appears at important points to join the whole narrative of the individual stories, creating a colourful kaleidoscope of fairytale characters and images of Oriental character: “The program I was guided by in composing Scheherazade consisted of separate, unconnected episodes and pictures from The Arabian Nights, scattered through all four movements of my suite: the sea and Sinbad’s ship, the fantastical narrative of the Kalandar Prince, the Prince and the Princess, the Baghdad festival and the ship dashing against the rock with the bronze rider upon it.” The composer had originally given the individual movements names based on these stories, but he removed the programmatic titles from the printed edition: “For people to go digging around in my composition to find an overly definite programme was not what I wanted.” What was much more important to him was the fact that the music portrayed “various tales of some one person (who happens to be Scheherazade).” The musical theme by which Rimsky-Korsakov depicts Sheherazade is the very embodiment of grace, soaring with natural lightness, radiating a feeling of security and love. At the same time, it makes subtle appearances throughout the work in different moods, provoking more and more curiosity. Its power appears at its fullest at the very end, bringing the peaceable transformation of the sultan’s theme. Once the sultan has finally found reconciliation with the world and with himself, it is in the comforting and tender embrace of Sheherazade.

“My last name Zhang means to open in Chinese, and the first name Xian means the string, so it literally means open string. My journey started with my parents – from my name I already knew they had this dream of making me a musician, and the piano was the instrument they had in mind. I was born at the end of Cultural Revolution, all the western instruments were burned or destroyed, so there was nowhere to find the piano for me even to purchase. So, when I was about four, my dad, who used to be a luthier, who used to make violins, guitars, cellos, he decided to build one. He knew how to put together a piano and he did that. He built it by hand from whatever he could find. It was really a gift of life.”

This is how the Chinese-American conductor Xian Zhang describes her early musical career; she subsequently switched her specialism to conducting whilst studying music. An unexpected turning point came when she was twenty, when she was given the opportunity to stand in for her professor during rehearsals for Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Central Opera House in Beijing. This successful conductor is now in her eleventh season at the helm of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra; she is also in her second year as music director of the Seattle Symphony, with whom she has enjoyed a long-standing collaboration since her debut there in 2008. She was also recently appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the China NCPA Orchestra and continues to serve as Conductor Emeritus of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano, having held the post of music director there from 2009 to 2016.

As a guest conductor, Xian Zhang will appear during the 2026/2027 season with orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony and the São Paulo Symphony; in Europe, in addition to the Czech Philharmonic, she will also perform with, for example, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Belgian National Orchestra and the Berlin and French Radio Symphony Orchestras. In recent years, she has also distinguished herself in the field of opera – she successfully conducted Madama Butterfly and Tosca at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and went on to work at the Finnish National Opera, amongst others.

Xian Zhang has also enjoyed a string of successes and received several prestigious awards – her recording for Deutsche Grammophon, featuring works by Jennifer Higdon and Kevin Puts with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the ensemble Time for Three, won a Grammy Award in two categories in 2022, whilst two concert films produced in collaboration with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra during the coronavirus pandemic were honoured with Emmy Awards. In 2023 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by The Juilliard School and in 2026 was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

When asked what the essence of conducting is, Xian Zhang replied in one of her interviews: “Conducting is about leading and also it is about when to control and when to let go, when to let the orchestra play and kind of release it, so it would really go on its own.” She concluded the interview with her vision for the future: “My wish is that we could in any way attract younger audience – children with their families, young professionals or people whoʼve never come to a symphonic concert into a concert halls. I hope to reach them; thatʼs my goal and something I really look forward to.”