Raymond Yiu's Violin Concerto: A Soulful Reflection on Exile and Nostalgia

By Leilani Polk 

So far, reviews of Raymond Yiu’s Violin Concerto have been glowing. The Times of London wrote that the world premiere “endowed this BBC Symphony Orchestra concert with an unusually high quotient of musical substance for ears, heart and mind,” while the South China Morning Post wrote of the work’s Hong Kong debut being “not only substantial, but accessible.” This month, he’ll bring the Seattle Symphony co-commission to Benaroya Hall for its U.S. premiere. 

Yiu didn’t start his career as a composer. Surprisingly, he spent more than a decade of his professional life working in IT. 

Born in Hong Kong in 1973, Yiu began piano lessons at age 4, though his interest in music didn’t become serious until after he was seeking his degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at London’s Imperial College. He didn’t feel qualified to major in music, having never studied it formally. “All the subjects I took were science-based — a legacy of my education in Hong Kong during my early years. Music played only a very small part of it.” His enthusiasm for engineering diminished as he got deeper into his studies, however. “It was around this time that I realized I wanted to be a composer, so I started self-teaching composing — borrowing scores from the library, listening to music with them and getting a sense of how different styles of music are visually represented on pages. After I graduated, I went to work in the field of Information Technology, as it was the field I felt was relevant to my studies and yet not as mind-numbing as engineering. It gave me enough free time to compose.” 

For 13 years, he composed on the side, establishing an impactful friendship with composer Lukas Foss and then experiencing the 2001 premiere of his chamber piece Distance of the Moon, as conducted by Foss at the Bridgehampton Music Festival. Using culture, history and heritage as inspiration, he continued composing orchestral, chamber and choral works straddling East and West sounds while also touching on a bit of jazz (he is also a jazz pianist). 

A grueling schedule working IT full time while finishing a stage commission from Aldeburgh Almeida Opera, The Original Chinese Conjuror (2006), finally pushed him into burnout. “I did not write a single note for two years,” he said, explaining how difficult it was to get started once he returned to composing in 2008. “I seemed to have lost my way in expressing myself via music. This, I later found, was because I lacked a sense of identity in my musical upbringing and the way I processed my influences.” 

In 2009, with encouragement from his now-husband, he abandoned IT and enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. By 2010, he’d won a BASCA British Composer Award for his piece Northwest Wind. His career as a significant composer was really solidified in 2013 with the world premiere of his 18-minute work, The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, performed by preeminent conductor Long Yu and the BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBCSO) at Barbican Hall.  

Other notable career highlights include the 2015 BBC Proms premiere of his poetry-setting Symphony with countertenor Andrew Watts, conductor Edward Gardner and the BBCSO; The World Was Once All Miracle, first performed at Manchester International Festival in 2017, and nominated in the large-scale composition category of the 2018 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards; and a chamber piece commemorating the Chinese Labour Corps of World War I, Corner of a Foreign Field, premiered by LSO St. Luke’s and shortlisted for a 2020 Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award. 

Yiu’s Violin Concerto — a co-commission between the Seattle Symphony, BBCSO and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra — is a soulful reflection on exile and nostalgia, meditating on “the turbulent history of China in the 20th century, and the place of Chinese musicians in the realm of western classical music.” He was particularly inspired by the life of Ma Sicong (1912–1987), a Chinese violinist and composer who, in the 1960s, escaped torture by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, found his way to the U.S. and never returned to China. The political and social unrest in Hong Kong in recent years prompted Yiu’s family to relocate to the UK, adding a personal poignancy to the work. “As a person from the Chinese diaspora, stories of other members of the community often draw my attention. Ma Sicong is a special case as he is quite a household name in China and many of the Chinese-speaking regions.” 

He was also inspired by Rhapsody in Red: How Western Classical Music Became Chinese, a book by Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai that investigates the history of an artform rooted in the West, finding its home in the East, and becoming an integral part of China's cultural landscape throughout the 20th century and beyond. “This sparked the idea of composing a set of works that explore this subject in different trajectories, and the Violin Concerto would naturally become a part of the set.” Another work in this set, entitled Old Bei, commissioned by Hong Kong Philharmonic in 2020 to celebrate Beethoven’s 250, explores the impact of Beethoven — both his music and his life — on Chinese culture. “As I get older, there is an increasing desire to explore my past — a past that I had, as well as a past that I could have had. Sometimes I wonder if I would be as interested in Chinese music and culture if I never went to the UK.” 

Written for violinist Esther Yoo, his 37-minute-long Violin Concerto is cast in four movements: Larghetto, volubile (an introduction); Vivo con brio–Andantino grazioso (a scherzo in the style of shidaiqu, a type of Chinese popular music); Andante desolato (a soliloquy cast as a cadenza); and Mesto, a finale that draws on the sounds of Nostalgia from Sicong’s Inner Mongolia Suite (1937). 

“From conception to completion, the Violin Concerto took over six years to write,” Yiu said, pointing out the unusual structure of the weight increasing with each movement. “We go from a misty, fractured introduction, to a bright, light-footed second movement, followed by a movement for the soloist alone, and finished with a final movement that makes up half of the piece in duration. Partly I wanted to challenge the structural expectation of placing the most substantial movement first, partly I was inspired by unusual narrative structures used by some old Chinese authors, particularly Pu Songling in his extraordinary collection of ghost/supernatural fables collectively known as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio.” 

Yiu said the world premiere of his concerto with the BBCSO was amazing. “It was magical to finally witness a piece living in my head for six-and-a-half years being realized, and so brilliantly too.” But for him, the Hong Kong premiere was something else entirely. “There was a sense of electricity in the air when the third movement finished. Maybe it was the Chinese music references (shidaiqu, erhu and Ma Sicong), or the notion of nostalgia in the work, which resonated with the audience of my birthplace on a level that was quite unique.” 

Raymond Yiu’s Violin Concerto is presented in the Dvořák New World Symphony program, April 10–12, with Esther Yoo as soloist. 

Esther Yoo’s performances are generously sponsored by Mel and Leena Sturman. 

Performances of Raymond Yiu’s Violin Concerto are generously underwritten by the Richard E. Lang and Jane Lang Davis Living Music Program.