GREENSBORO, N.C. — Christopher Dragon is the affable, buoyant, and enthusiastic new music director of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra, in the third largest city in the state with a population of over 300,000. He’s a busy man. He is also the resident conductor of the Colorado Symphony in Denver and the newly appointed music director of the Philly Pops.
The Australian-born Dragon (call him “Chris”) sat down for an interview in September, when he talked about why he applied for the GSO position. “It’s an established orchestra,” he said. “It has a history. It’s a larger orchestra than I was with previously.” He’s here on a five-year contract, which gives him time to “do things.”
“My wife and I were so surprised at how diverse it really is here, and how welcoming everyone is,” Dragon said of his first impressions of Greensboro. “It made it really easy for us to be a part of this community. And the orchestra, they all really want to rehearse and work. They really want to play, and they all give their all to get the best result possible.”
Among other pluses about Greensboro, the conductor cited the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts, which opened in 2021, and a dedicated orchestral rehearsal space independent of the Tanger Center. These things, he said, demonstrate that “the community here wants the orchestra to thrive, and that musicians want to see it improve. As a conductor, you can’t really ask for more. This is perfect for someone to come in and put their stamp on it.”
Dragon hails from Perth, the capital (population: 2.3 million) of Western Australia — “an isolated city,” he said. “All my education was in Australia.” He discovered he wanted to be a conductor just by watching others on the podium. “I would go to symphony concerts and spend the whole time just transfixed on the conductor,” he said. “I came to symphony concerts very late in my life, maybe my first year at the university. We had a music academy and I studied for a performance degree in clarinet and played in a lot of orchestras.”
Seated in the back of the orchestra, the clarinetist would hear things that he thought could be improved, but he felt it wasn’t really his place to make suggestions: “You’d probably get socked in the nose if you would say something like ‘why don’t you play it like this?’ to one of your colleagues. I think I wanted an overall input in the music-making.”
Dragon was chosen as the music director in Greensboro after the orchestra auditioned seven conductor candidates in the 2023-24 season. Last year’s Greensboro Symphony programs were, for the most part, already planned. Dragon chose Dvořák’s Eighth Symphony to add to the already scheduled Bruch Violin Concerto and Beethoven Leonore Overture No. 3. The Dvořák, he said, was a good starting point: “It’s a very positive, uplifting symphony, and I wanted to start my time here on a positive note. It’s not too serious. I really wanted to show the audience and the orchestra kind of who I am and how I approach” music-making.
Greensboro’s new music director also conducts pop and film concerts. In March, Dragon collaborated with South African-born American singer and songwriter Gregory Alan Isakov, with whom he had worked before. Lisa Crawford, the orchestra’s CEO, said the sold-out concert “brought people from all over the country. Only 16 percent of the audience was from Greensboro.” Dragon will be conducting several of the upcoming pops concerts with guests LeAnn Rimes and Mandy Gonzalez, among others.
“I think that is something that sets me apart from lots of conductors,” he said. “I don’t just do the masterworks and classical pieces, and I don’t just do film or pops. I conduct everything. I believe that orchestras need to adapt to this modern time. That’s a great way of building the community around the orchestra.”
Dragon realizes that just because people come to a pops or film concert doesn’t mean that they will attend a classical program. The goal, he said, is to win “even just a handful” “of converts to classical fare. “And having the same conductor doing each of those shows helps bridge that gap,” he said. “It’s impossible to appeal to everyone’s taste. This is the beautiful thing about music: It’s all subjective.”
Back in Perth, he said, “I conducted everything I could. Every week I would be conducting a different ensemble, from community orchestras to brass bands to concert bands to youth orchestras and an opera company. Everything I could conduct, I did.” He even formed his own orchestra. “I got all my friends together. Craziest thing I’ve ever done, put on a concert, sold tickets, all that sort of stuff. Then I went to masterclasses overseas,” studying with Fabio Luisi as well as Neeme Järvi and his son Paavo.
Dragon came to the U.S. in his mid-twenties when he won the position with the Colorado Symphony. “I was young and single, a full head of hair, and now it’s been 10 or 11 years. I love it here. I have no intention of leaving, and I’m married now.”
The 2025-26 season is the first in Greensboro for which Dragon chose all the music. “We’re basically playing the hits of classical music” — a lineup that includes the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, the Verdi Requiem with the GSO Master Chorale, and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. “A lot were suggested to me last year, and I’m trying to cater to what our community wants to hear,” the conductor said “I wanted to have an accessible season, so maybe someone who hasn’t been to the symphony before will recognize a few snippets here and there.”
There are only a couple of pieces that are not the tried-and-true: Concert Overture by Florence Price and Michael Daugherty’s Harp of Ages. At this point, Dragon doesn’t want to push the envelope: “I still enjoy music that has a melody. I want to make sure the contemporary piece is very digestible. I think we can do contemporary music as long as it’s in the right context with what else is in the program.”
Some GSO musicians had noted last year that Dragon was well prepared for rehearsals. “It depends on how much time you have,” he said of the process. “I think as a conductor, that’s one of your main jobs. It’s not even waving a stick, it’s managing your time so you can cover a piece as well as you possibly can. It’s all about preparation. Most of my time from morning until night I spend studying scores because there is so much coming up.
“I think orchestras always prefer a conductor who’s clear. It’s not really about stick technique. It’s really about the energy you give off to the orchestra because that’s what they feed on. When you see someone on the podium that is so committed and believes so strongly in what they are doing, you have to go along with that, inspiring them to go on that journey with you. Would you rather take a performance that is perfectly clean, but nothing happens? Or one that may be a bit rough around the edges, but something happens on stage. My goal is for something to happen on stage.”
In balancing his podium commitments, Dragon said his focus will be on Greensboro, Philadelphia, and Colorado. “Everything revolves around that,” he said. “I get invited to do a lot of guest conducting, and I turn most of them down because I want to be prepared when I’m in front of an orchestra.” He rarely takes time off. “It’s hard. There’s just not time.” He confesses that his wife insisted he take the whole month off for their wedding and promise not to bring any scores: “And I’m so grateful she made me do that.”
The conductor said the years have altered his view of familiar works: “I often look back at scores and think ‘what the hell was I thinking? I’m going to try this now.’ As we grow older, our perceptions and thoughts about pieces change. When you approach a piece years later, you’re not the same person. You’re always learning.”
Dragon spends a good deal of time listening to recordings, which he called a ‘super helpful” resource in preparing his own interpretations. “I mark up my scores first, my phrase structures, and I also put questions about things I’m not quite sure about or how I solve these problems, what’s the best way,” he said. “So, I use recordings. I’m interested in hearing how (other conductors) have addressed those same issues, and what works and what maybe doesn’t work.”
The new maestro’s predecessor, Dmitry Sitkovetsky, was music director of the GSO for 20 years. “He put a big stamp on this orchestra,” Dragon said. “He appointed a lot of great musicians.” One wonderful thing Sitkovetsky did was to establish a chamber-music concert using members of the orchestra and the symphony’s guest soloist; that is starting up again after last year’s hiatus. Dragon said the musicians “love it, and they get to work with our soloists. It is so much fun getting to play in that close setting. I miss that collaboration. Maybe one day, I’ll play (clarinet) in one.”
