Raymond Yiu

Composer Raymond Yiu combines not only sounds but also themes from China and the West in his music. Yiu is also active as a conductor, jazz pianist, and writer on music. Yiu was born in Hong Kong in 1973. He started piano lessons at four, and as a teenager, he began writing music but remained mostly self-taught. In 1990, Yiu moved to England to pursue musical studies at Imperial College London. He began composing again as a student there and this time received advice informally from Julian Anderson, Lukas Foss, and others. By the early 2000s, Yiu's compositions were beginning to attract attention. His Distance of the Moon for 11 solo strings was conducted at the Bridgehampton Music Festival by Foss in 2001. Yiu attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama on a postgraduate scholarship, studying with Anderson and receiving a doctorate in 2009. Yiu scored a breakthrough in 2006 with The Original Chinese Conjuror, a chamber opera based on the true story of magician William Ellsworth Robinson, who performed under the Chinese persona, Chung Ling Soo. The opera sold out its entire run at the Aldeburgh Festival and has been revived in productions at the Musikverein in Vienna by Teatro Barroco in 2013 and the Left Bank Opera in Leeds by Northern Opera Group in 2018. Other notable Yiu works include Maomao Yü (2008), a quintet for piano and four traditional Chinese instruments that was premiered by superstar pianist Lang Lang and the Silk String Quartet, and The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured (2013), premiered by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Yiu's Symphony for countertenor and orchestra (2015) set texts by Walt Whitman, Constantine P. Cavafy, Thom Gunn, and John Donne; it was premiered by countertenor Andrew Watts and the BBC Symphony at the Proms in 2015. Yiu's orchestral song cycle The World Was Once All Miracle (2017) made its London premiere in 2018 with baritone Roderick Williams and the BBC Symphony under Sir Andrew Davis; the work garnered a large-scale composition award nomination at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards that year. Yiu's Corner of a Foreign Field, commemorating a Chinese labor corps of World War I, garnered another Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards nomination in 2020. A live recording of The World Was Once All Miracle and the Symphony appeared on the Delphian label in 2021. ~ James Manheim