Feifan Jiang wins the Cantelli conducting competition – and five more prizes besides

The Chinese conductor Feifan Jiang has won the 14th Premio Internazionale di Direzione d’Orchestra “Guido Cantelli”, the competition run by the Fondazione Teatro Coccia in Novara. The 25-year-old was named the winner on Sunday evening, 4 October, at the Teatro Coccia, after a final concert in which four young conductors took turns on the podium of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano.

Jiang joins a roll of winners that since 1961 has included Riccardo Muti, Eliahu Inbal, Ádám Fischer, Hubert Soudant and Donato Renzetti. Since the competition was revived in 2020 it has been won by Tianyi Lu (2020) and Min Gyu Song (2024).

Alongside the first prize and its cheque for €12,000, Jiang swept up almost every other award going: the critics’ jury prize, the agents’ and managers’ prize, the young people’s jury prize (known as the “Empathy” prize), the prize of the Friends of the Teatro Coccia, and the prize voted for by the players of the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano themselves.

Yuta Kobayashi took second prize, worth €8,000, and Mauro Mariani came third, winning €5,000 as well as the City jury prize. The fourth finalist was Giovanni Fanizza.

A Muti protégé

Jiang is the conductor-in-residence of the Xi’an Symphony Orchestra and is working towards a Doctor of Musical Arts in conducting at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He has studied with Riccardo Muti, Jorma Panula, Markus Stenz, Alpaslan Ertüngealp, Ronald Zollman, Ulrich Windfuhr, Mark Gibson and David Hayes.

In 2024, Muti chose him as one of four young conductors from around the world to take part in the first Italian Opera Academy in China.

Four finalists, four programmes

Each finalist conducted a different programme. Fanizza opened with the overture to Bellini’s Norma and Andrei Octavian Popescu’s 4 città invisibili, winner of the competition’s 2026 call for composers. Kobayashi tackled Richard Strauss‘s tone poem Don Juan, Op. 20.

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 in E minor, From the New World, was split between the last two: Mariani conducted the first and second movements, and Jiang the third and fourth.

The final capped three days of selection rounds. Eighteen young conductors from 12 countries, chosen from 200 applications from around the world, took part in the eliminatory rounds and semi-final at the Auditorium di Milano from 1 to 3 October, with only four going through to Novara.

An international jury

The main prizes were awarded by a jury chaired by Donato Renzetti, who himself won the competition’s tenth edition in 1980. Alongside him sat Roanna Gibson, concerts and planning director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra; Didier de Cottignies, artistic director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo; and Riccardo Frizza, the competition’s artistic consultant, who is music and artistic director of Bergamo’s Donizetti Opera and honorary conductor of the Hungarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Choir.

The rest of the panel was Patrick Fournillier, music director of the Polish National Opera at Warsaw’s Teatr Wielki; Cristina Rocca, vice-president for artistic planning at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Corrado Rovaris, music director of Opera Philadelphia; and Ryuichiro Sonoda, artistic director of Fujisawa City Opera and principal conductor of the Pacific Philharmonia Tokyo.

The critics’ prize (€2,000) was decided by Carla Moreni of Il Sole 24 Ore, Gian Mario Benzing of the Corriere della Sera and James Imam of the Financial Times. The agents’ prize (€2,000) came from Lorenzo Baldrighi of Lorenzo Baldrighi Artists Management, Mark Hildrew of Askonas Holt and Nicholas Mathias of IMG Artists.

The orchestra’s own award goes to the candidate its players judge most deserving; it was handed to Jiang on the night by Luca Santaniello, the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano’s leader.

Seventy years after Cantelli

The evening opened with the unveiling on stage of the Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, awarded to this year’s competition, in the presence of the Prefect of Novara, Francesco Garsia, and the competition’s artistic director, Corinne Baroni. The organisers noted that the honour carries particular weight this year, which marks 70 years since Guido Cantelli’s death.

Arturo Toscanini elected Cantelli as his “spiritual heir” after seeing him conduct at La Scala in Milan in May 1948. He became music director of La Scala in November 1956, but a week later, at the age of 36, he was killed in a plane crash.

The composer Popescu also collected his award for 4 città invisibili: €3,000 and the publication of the previously unpublished score by Sconfinarte. It was chosen by a panel chaired by Baroni, with the composers Alberto Cara, Cristian Carrara and Marco Taralli and the conductor Alessandro Calcagnile.

The next Premio Cantelli will take place from 5 to 8 October 2028.