Conductor, entrepreneur, and producer, Sean Li is one of the leading vanguards of the youth classical music scene in Hong Kong, credited for creating and producing a number of acclaimed cultural projects to audiences locally and worldwide.
Praised by critics as a conductor who “delivers expression and passion in music” and “creates maximum integration between rhythm and power”, Sean is best associated with his founding of the Hong Kong Festival Orchestra and Voices (HKFO) in 2009, an organisation he has since served as its Chairman and Music Director.
At the helm of HKFO, Sean has worked as conductor with many distinguished artists locally and globally. These include cellist Jian Wang, prodigious pianists Aristo Sham and Rachel Cheung, vocalists Jovita Leung, Carol Lin, Christopher Leung and Albert Lim. As a firm believer in making classical music accessible, Sean has also directed a sold-out crossover concert with pop music icon George Lam, as well as created an acclaimed classical music stand-up comedy with leading comedian Jim Chim.
As a pioneer in promoting classical music via creative media in Hong Kong, Sean is the initiator, conductor and one of the producers behind HKFO’s universally acclaimed Beethoven “Ode to Joy” Flash Mob in Shatin New Town Plaza and the 2014 music video “The Young Person’s Guide to HKFO”. The former production has attracted over one million views on YouTube to critical acclaim, and was reviewed worldwide by Moyers & Company, as well as featured in a documentary produced by the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (Second German Television). The production is due to be exhibited in late 2016 at the Musée de la musique at the heart of the Philharmonie de Paris under the “Après Beethoven” exhibition. In 2014, Sean further conducted one of the city’s first performances of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture with choir and cannons, to highly positive reviews.
Under Sean’s eight years’ of work at HKFO, the organisation has grown from an 80-piece orchestra to one of the city’s largest operating youth orchestras and choirs, involving more than 300 choristers and orchestral players and an administrative team of 30 members of staff, collaborating frequently with international artists including cellist Trey Lee, pianist Yundi Li and conductor Vassily Sinaisky.
A humanitarian as well as a musician, Sean began his conducting career founding the Chamber Orchestra for the Reconstruction of Sichuan in aid of the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. Sean further founded and conducted the Hong Kong Joint-University Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir in 2011, a first-of-the-time event joining the orchestras and choirs of all ten universities and tertiary institutions in Hong Kong in aid of the devastating earthquakes, tsunami and nuclear power plant leaks in Japan.
