Richard Tang Yuk is leaving The Princeton Festival.

Tang Yuk is stepping down as executive and artistic director from the festival he founded in 2004.

The festival has made Princeton a June destination for music-lovers seeking quality opera, musical theater, chamber works, Baroque performance, jazz, dance, and multi-media.

Under Tang Yuk’s leadership, the festival has grown in scale from two events and four performances in 2004, to encompass eight events and 22 performances – in addition to 20 free lectures and workshops – in 2019. This year, the festival met the challenges of coronavirus with an ambitious menu of online offerings, mixing new and archival material.

Tang Yuk’s opera performances have earned acclaim in such publications as Opera News and The New York Times. Repertoire at the Princeton Festival has always been an engaging balance of the familiar and the unusual. Tang Yuk and his crackerjack team of technicians have presented uniformly excellent productions of “The Flying Dutchman,” “Peter Grimes,” “Porgy and Bess,” “The Rake’s Progress,” “Nixon in China,” Handel’s “Ariodante,” and a double-bill of “Gianni Schicchi” and Rachmaninoff’s “Francesca da Rimini,” among others.

Gregory Jon Geehern, the festival’s associate conductor and assistant to the artistic director, will step up as acting artistic director.

On September 23 at 6 pm EDT, the Princeton Festival will hold the finals of its annual piano competition, this year to be presented online. The competition will feature participants from around the world. For tickets and information, visit princetonfestival.org.

Sincere best wishes to Richard Tang Yuk. Thank you, Richard, for all that you’ve done!