Summer Neighborhood Concerts: Movement & Music

Conductor Yue Bao serves as the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony, assisting Music Director Juraj Valčuha. In May 2019, she completed a two-year tenure as the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, working closely with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She has been active as both a conductor and assistant, working with conductors Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Michael Tilson Thomas, Osmo Vänskä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Marin Alsop, David Robertson, and Itzhak Perlman.

Yue made her subscription debut with the Houston Symphony on the opening night concert of the 2020-21 Season, and conducted the orchestra for its 2021 summer concert series at Miller Outdoor Theater. She made her Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut at the 2021 Ravinia Festival. Highlights of this season include debuts with the San Francisco Symphony and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Yue was the Bruno Walter Memorial Foundation Conducting Fellow at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2019. In 2018, she served as the David Effron Conducting Fellow at the Chautauqua Music Festival, where her concerts with the Festival Orchestra received accolades from audiences and musicians.

In 2019, she toured China with the Vienna Philharmonic, assisting Andrés Orozco-Estrada. She served as an assistant for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta and David Lockington, making her conducting debut with the orchestra in 2016. She has also assisted Osmo Vänskä at the Minnesota Orchestra and Gilbert Varga at the St. Louis Symphony. Recent appearances include the Shanghai Opera Symphony Orchestra, the Xiamen Philharmonic Orchestra, and the New Symphony Orchestra. Equally at home with symphonic and operatic repertoire, she has conducted Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Bizet’s Carmen, Kurt Weill’s Mahagonny: Ein Songspiel, and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. She is also active as a pianist, recently playing for a production of Les contes d’Hoffmann at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Along with her artist diploma from The Curtis Institute of Music, Yue holds bachelor’s degrees in orchestral conducting and opera accompanying from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the Mannes School of Music.

Jasmine Renee Thomas is an artist, educator, and native Houstonian with a Bachelor of Arts degree in theatre arts and communication studies from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. Upon graduation, Jasmine returned to Houston as a Teach for America corps member with her alma mater, Houston Independent School District. Since then, she has gained a decade of experience in various educational settings, from the manager of Arts Integration Programming with the Alley Theater to resource author, to classroom teacher—earning her the title of Spring ISD’s 2021 Elementary Teacher of the Year.

Outside of the classroom, Jasmine has shared her talents on stages and on screens across New York City, Austin, and local companies such as Vincent Victoria Presents, Rec Room Arts, 1989 Dreams, Dirt Dogs Theatre Co., 7972 Films, and Mildred’s Umbrella. Currently, she teaches 4^th-grade reading, leads her church’s youth and children ministry, and facilitates theatre workshops as well as individualized tutoring through her company, Tutor Time. Jasmine is ecstatic about the opportunity to bring Neighborhood Concerts to life with the Houston Symphony!

www.jasminereneethomas.com