John Winzenburg

John Winzenburg is a professor of music at Hong Kong Baptist University, where he conducts the Cantoría Hong Kong. He and the Cantoría have actively promoted Chinese choral music in dialogue with international repertoire since they first earned a Gold Medal at the Czech 2010 Festival of Songs Olomouc and they presented a Weekend Concert at the National Centre for Performing Arts in Beijing in 2012. Winzenburg performed as Choral Director of the premiere of Hong Kong Odyssey at the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Festival and served as Chorus Master of The Suppliant Women in collaboration with the Actors Touring Company (UK) and the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh at the 2018 Hong Kong Arts Festival. He has appeared regularly in vocal and instrumental performances with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. Since 2015, he has conducted the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and the Choir of Royal Holloway, and has appeared on the BBC Radio 3 program In Tune. He has also collaborated with the New Zealand Secondary Students Choir, the National Youth Chamber Choir of Great Britain, and the King’s Voices at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University.

Winzenburg is active as a clinician, presenter, and adjudicator at international choral events worldwide, including Argentina, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Winzenburg has premiered numerous Chinese works, including Hong Kong Odyssey and a special Colla Voce 2019 喜粵! concert of all newly composed Cantonese pieces, as well as a wide range of contemporary music that includes the U.S. premiere of Karura by Japanese composer Akira Nishimura with renowned oboist Thomas Indermühle, “Aurora” by Joyce Tang (Ablaze Records Millenium Masters series), the cantata Anesti by James Boznos, and new compositions for Indonesian gamelan, percussion, and piano with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble.

Scholastically, Winzenburg’s international publications have appeared in the Journal of Musicological Research, Perspectives of New Music, Palgrave Macmillan, The University of Michigan Press, Twentieth-Century China, Asian Music, CHIME, and the Journal of the Central Conservatory of Music. His recent research has focused on musical experimentation by Aaron Avshalomov in pre-1949 Shanghai, hybridization and hybridity in Chinese-Western “fusion concertos,” and new Chinese choral music. Winzenburg is the editor of the anthology Half Moon Rising: Choral Music from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan (Edition Peters, February 2015).