The job leading the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi came her way only a few months after her stint in New York came to an end in 2009. It’s the new boy among Italian orchestra founded only 20 years ago, and is a model of private enterprise. “We get no subsidy, and so we really have to work hard.” It’s quite a coup for a Chinese woman. Does she see herself as part of a vanguard of Chinese conductors and orchestras, which will soon challenge the West on its own ground? She pulls a sceptical face. “I think this will take a long time. An orchestra is not just a group of players, it’s a whole tradition, which you can see in things like its library of orchestral parts. With an old orchestra these can tell you so much, because they have been marked by generations of players. This is not something you can create overnight.”