The year is winding to a much-anticipated conclusion, and maybe it couldn’t come sooner! There’s still the world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) with LiLa and the Hong Kong Dance Company that has finally been publicised! But beyond that, I’ll be in London and Manchester over the weekend and into early next week to take some few steps forward for the collaboration project with MIF and Asia+, the heir of New Vision Arts Festival, and also back home in the United States for the days leading up to Christmas. It will be a lot of time spent in airports, but I feel that long journeys are a wonderful (and important) opportunity to reflect, plan, and search- I remember, of course, the very beginning of 2022, finishing Os dias mais longos e os mais curtos (2022) on the tarmac in London Heathrow on my way to Luxembourg for the world premiere of En vertu de… (2021) and so on. This time, there’s no music in the works presently, but a lot to look forward to in the coming year.
It is perhaps a little bit premature to reflect on this year which has felt especially intense and heavy, from the UK premiere of Russia: Today (2020) at Kings Place which received a ton of press attention from the likes of New York Times (not to mention some hacks), to finally bringing The Once and Future (2021) to Hong Kong with Anandi Bhattacharya and the Berliner Philharmoniker musicians. And together with Giorgio Biancorosso, we finally set out on our HK Ballet project, completing filming just two weeks ago with our incredible dancer and choreographer, Shen Jie and Yuh Egami, respectively. The soundtrack for it, beautifully recorded (and composed) by Anandi Bhattacharya with a lovely accompaniment by Joby Burgess, is ready too. Things are finally moving after interminable preparation and efforts.
If I’m really honest, I am beyond ready for 2024. The year will fill up and I am looking forward to important changes in life. 2023 has come but not yet gone- but it has brought a tremendous amount of lessons, experiences, and wisdom. The remaining weeks, spent in the air, and in staging the final performance of the year, will hopefully contain love, wisdom, and celebration in equal measure.
The intervening weeks between the Hong Kong premiere of The Once and Future (2021) and the upcoming world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) have been anything but empty- I had the great privilege of working with Joby Burgess and Anandi Bhattacharya on a new work for Hong Kong Ballet for which the music was fully recorded last week and the choreography will be filmed next week, and this has provided plenty of inspiration to last me through the stubbornly warm days here in Hong Kong. But there has been more to keep one excited, too: new and unprecedented interest in The Once and Future from both European and Asian promoters which should mean the work truly has legs in the coming seasons, and some promising progress for the new project for Manchester International Festival‘s 2025 edition. It means that this difficult and unexpected year won’t be defined only as such.
And then there’s 2024- the University of Oxford, one of my three ‘almae matres’ and the only one that hasn’t turned into a shell of itself yet, will host a screening and panel discussion of the Russia: Today (2020) project with EXAUDI. And I’ll be back in the UK in May 2025 for a two-week residency at MIF to properly develop the collaborative project with Kingsley Ng and Stephanie Cheung which, aside from working with South Korean violin virtuoso Bomsori Kim, might veer into the completely (for me) unknown genre of trance-techno.
Looking into the future from the present, particularly considering the sound of the new Hong Kong Ballet digital work, I find myself at a creative crossroads among many other crossroads, career-wise and in life in general. Some years ago, and rather consistently, I would worry about what success might mean for my urge to create and whether there would be any fire left; as some close collaborators of mine keep reminding me, I only planned to come to Hong Kong for a short time and hardly imagined I’d spend days after days in production and project management, paying salaries to musicians and signing management deals for my own work. I still feel uneasy and deliberately impermanent about such tasks and especially rebellious about becoming anything else before a composer, and not out of some sort of artistic pride or disrespect of the incredible effort it takes to make great things happen in music. In fact, it’s superhuman, just that compromising time on creating new work causes me to feel unworthy of the vision and ambition I do have on a purely creative level. And there, I don’t compromise. Or, rather, from 2024 onwards, I won’t.
I never thought we could finally get there but once we did, it felt somewhere between euphoria and the excision of a huge weight- The Once and Future (2021) finally had its two years-postponed Hong Kong premiere on the 21st and 22nd October at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre with Anandi Bhattacharya and the Berliner Philharmoniker musicians delivering three incredible shows. But it was not only them of course- the incredible tech team, which consisted of talented and super-professional artists and engineers, delivered a knock-out production. And now it has legs. Of course, the process over the past few months of understanding that it is effectively my production to handle also means that changes will come for the future, quite major ones. While the materials and thinking behind the project are without reproach, its path forward will require flattening some egos and creating something even incisive and ambitious.
This comes at a time when I’d really prefer to spend more time composing than producing. The post-NVAF days were heavy and even the chance to spend a few days for my brother with my brother in the Ryukyu Islands – some truly exotic locales – did little to put the production responsibilities in the rearview mirror. Many aspects of it are exciting: developing the project for further concerts in Europe, mainland China, and India has been a fun challenge, as has been looking into further funding and co-production options. Ultimately, though, my goal is to return to music composition as a central practice, and leave the other things I’m frustratingly too good at to colleagues and collaborators. Creativity needs space; time; focus.
The next weeks, we’ll be developing the Hong Kong Ballet production under Giorgio Biancorosso‘s direction and the artistry of vocalist Anandi Bhattacharya and percussionist Joby Burgess, choreographed by Yuh Egami and danced by the principal male dancer of the company, Shen Jie. The development of this brief work is incredibly exciting primarily because of the top artistry of the team. What a privilege it is to have this space to see another crazy idea through.
It’s the final sprint- but really, it’s the moment in the long slog where the finish line is properly in sight. The Once and Future (2021) debuts in Hong Kong next weekend on October 21st at 3pm and 8pm and October 22nd at 3pm. It only dawned on me a few days ago when I received the crew passes for the production that I was “Executive Producer” and not “Composer” that too much of my energy has gone to this creation of a different kind- management, production, development, and so on. Despite this year advancing various projects creatively too – in fact, the promotional/provisional work for Hong Kong Ballet with Joby Burgess and Anandi Bhattacharya is well on its way and quite exciting! – I have really sublimated too much creativity to getting things off the ground. And while that can be incredibly rewarding and even empowering, it is also not what I do, or what I am. It’s interesting that it took this long to realise.
One work where I only really had to contribute as a composer and not much beyond is Vivacissimo (2023), which will receive its world premiere here in Hong Kong as well on December 29th with the fabulous cellist LiLa and the Hong Kong Dance Company. I’ve now posted those events on the website and look forward to returning to Hong Kong to see out 2023 with this production.
After a truly busy and difficult month, and considering all of the terrible events going on around the world, not least of which the terrorism in Israel and the useful idiots maintaining some sort of moral equivalency about it, it will be a relief to hear music at last. The Hong Kong government has publicised the work, and of course the MTR has been periodically, or rather, slightly erratically covered in advertisements of the project. It’s been lovely to see for some days an entire wall of Central station covered in New Vision Arts Festival posters, with The Once and Future rather central. One hopes that the Hong Kong audiences will give the work a chance. With all this turmoil in the world, humanity is all we have.
Barely a year has passed since the world premiere of Os dias mais longos e os mais curtos (2022), and while the work still resonates in a tremendous way (and, unbelievably, still causes interrupted breaths once viewers realise the ‘picture’ isn’t real), it’s time to look at new frontiers. That’s not to say that the work isn’t coming back! Giorgio Biancorosso and I are in advanced discussions to bring the project to Hong Kong (and the GBA) for the 2024-25 season, but in the meantime, a short promotional work with Hong Kong Ballet, percussionist Joby Burgess, with whom I worked seven years ago on We are not alone (2015), and Indian world-pop vocalist Anandi Bhattacharya has taken shape, with recording sessions planned as early as later this week, and choreography by Yuh Egami beginning shortly thereafter.
Looking forward to just three weeks ’til the Berliner Philharmoniker musicians arrive for The Once and Future (2021), posters and ads have blanketed the MTR and even the sides of buildings- witness the Hong Kong Cultural Center draped in our lasers’ reds and blues. As we look ahead to further performances of this project in Berlin and in mainland China, it is also exciting to look at new interpretations and possibilities of the same material. We have taken on board a new lighting designer, and eventually, new solutions for the staging and tripartite relationship of screen to orchestra to stage will take shape. All of this is to say, a work ‘lives’ not through additional performances, but also through its evolution and responsiveness to place, time, and self-reflection.
All this sounds like it should be happening in remarkably peaceful circumstances and now I truly understand why artists go on residencies! (in my case, it always seemed like a nice retreat from life which is already something to that extent). These have been some of the busiest and most intense weeks of my life, not only taking over the production prep for The Once and Future in Hong Kong, but simultaneously developing two more projects, and coming back to university teaching. After a wild summer of four continents and even more mountains summited, perhaps that is what I richly deserve- but I’m taking it as a lesson. On the eve of my 36th birthday, it is never too late to learn.
The summer is officially over, one can say. I just got back to Hong Kong and despite the weight of everything that involves being back in town, including the start of the semester, it’s also a wonderful feeling and somehow there is enough time on my hands to start dealing with the many things that couldn’t be properly attended to while I was away. Most pertinent is of course the Hong Kong premiere of The Once and Future (2021) with Anandi Bhattacharya and the Berliner Philharmoniker musicians, conducted by Stanley Dodds– the South China Morning Post did a lovely preview of the work here. The world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) with the Hong Kong Dance Company and cellist LiLa will take place later in the winter at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media will be next up, and more beyond! So it should be a deeply busy but also deeply productive time back home, with an additional little promotional collaboration with Giorgio Biancorosso and Hong Kong Ballet – let’s say, a next step from our work together on Os dias mais longos e os mais curtos (2022) – also in the works.
If that sounds like a lot, it really is. Finding the time, space, and quiet to create (and not merely administrate and produce) is a constant tug-of-war between obligations and dreams. But without the latter, one has little incentive, not to mention inspiration, to bring anything to fruition and beyond that, to define the meaning behind the creation itself. There is so much automation and commoditised production in the arts now, which is almost the best-case scenario, because in many cases, the ‘product’ is not even conceived fully enough to be defined as such. Renewing oneself with each new work, rather than reproducing, is seriously draining and invasive, but then- why else? There is perhaps no characteristic of music as research that has been more misunderstood than this aspect: the research part is meant to be a deeply personal and internal exploration, not of increasingly more esoteric techniques and complex polyrhythms, but of oneself. I wish we could speak about this more.
This summer, looking back on it, I pushed myself in many ways, particularly to see, experience, and climb (literally! including up the absolutely perilous Corcovado), not with any stated purpose but as a way of confronting the mind and body with the unfamiliar. I became convinced long ago that this was and is somehow necessary for this cycle of creation to be true and profound and meaningful, even if the conviction is based on nothing more than faith. As I am imagining the new works, such as the large-scale work for MIF and New Vision Arts Festival that will premiere in 2025, I am thinking not of “what do I want to say”, but “what demands to speak through me”. What a difference a question makes.
Well, it’s the last (and first?) proper holiday of the summer and strangely enough my second time in South America in two and a half months. Brazil has been a dream for many years- an entire world of culture, colour, and experience, a Portugal in the ‘New World’ but also a completely distinct society, not to mention the home of my favourite author, João Guimarães Rosa. Arriving early this morning at barely past five am in São Paulo and taking the twisting highways through the Serra do Mar with one of my oldest friends from high school as the skies cleared and then darkened again, down to the at-times turquoise waters of the São Sebastião Channel- one feels like one is surely somewhere new.
And I would have hardly allowed myself such an indulgence unless I had finished the new work for LiLa and the Hong Kong Dance Company and indeed, it’s done! I already mentioned the title and much about this work in my last update but it’s just a particular pleasure to put a double bar on a new work and now immediately prepare for something new, a promotional ‘demo’ piece for Hong Kong Ballet that’s now in final plans. This will become the last new work I can sneak in this year before I have to turn my attention to the final planning for The Once and Future (2021) Hong Kong premiere (for which the tickets go on sale on Friday!), the world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media this December, and, finally, advanced preparation for the Manchester International Festival / New Vision Arts Festival co-commission that is finally on the docket for 2025.
It’s of course winter in Brazil, but one would hardly imagine that on the palm-fringed beaches of Ilhabela, perhaps the most paradisiacal island in conceivable reach of São Paulo. I’ll be back in Asia already next week and excited to start the academic year in Hong Kong with so much in development and so many ideas coming to fruition. The next few days of holiday, if I can even call it as such, will be a welcome respite and a little breather before a tremendously exciting autumn.
The new piece for the Hong Kong Dance Company to be performed by LiLa (and a slew of digital cello ensemble likenesses) is actually almost complete- the chance to work in such comfortable, quiet surroundings has been an absolute blessing and after having not written music for an inordinately long period of time, somehow there is still something left to say. But the music is worrying me a bit- between Os dias mais longos e os mais curtos (2022) and Otherhood (2022), tonality has taken such a central role in my work, it has now become an interesting adventure to see myself in this rather new world and reconcile this with so many extreme past works. There is of course a thread, perhaps a few- virtuosity and expression being central, and this sense of being on the absolute limit, which is perhaps the same thing, is still there. Regardless, there is a lot to think about and for the various upcoming works, including the big piece for the Manchester International Festival for 2025, it will be a challenge to myself to resist complacency.
This new piece, which I’ve titled Vivacissimo, will debut in December of this year- and perhaps around that time, a little project for the Hong Kong Ballet in the form of a music video / tech realisation will also debut. I’m in the very early conception phase of that project, but then again- it will have to be ready by the end of August already and life gets far busier from then on with the Hong Kong premiere of The Once and Future (2021), which will be announced very soon.
August will be, like June, a month of four continents- I’ll be in China as well as in Sikkim, a road trip in Brazil, time spent at home in California, and a brief stopover in London. It will be perhaps the last summer of such flexible scheduling and catching up on the last of the pandemic-postponed travels. And despite all the miles logged, it’s the calm before the storm of so much new work coming on.
Birds singing, wide open and impossibly green fields, the sun out past 10pm: this is how I remember summers from my childhood in the Baltics and after a gorgeous ten days in Puglia looking at properties, these few days spent in the almost-Dutch countryside just outside of Amsterdam are especially nostalgic in the best possible way. Of course, this childhood nostalgia is not only a memory of some inaccessible past, but of more recent summers, too- those spent a decade and a half ago which were my first as an independent ‘adult’ studying. and living in Berlin, as well as more recent years, when I’d go to the forests north of that city to pick blueberries. In fact, I’ll be in Berlin next week, planning both the Berliner Philharmoniker members‘ The Once and Future (2021) performance this coming autumn in Hong Kong as the headline act of the New Vision Arts Festival as well as something new with the stage director Katharina Schmitt.
Suddenly, the summer has gotten busier than planned in terms of creative work, as I’ll be putting together a brief piece with Giorgio Biancorosso and the Hong Kong Ballet, a kind of music video demonstrating some new perspectives on holographic technology in the digital space. And of course, preparations for the upcoming project with the Chinese cellist LiLa and the Hong Kong Dance Company for this coming December at CityU are progressing and I’ll be writing that ten-minute work later this month. It’s all a rather long way of saying, these calm, long days of summer will soon be subsumed into a working cycle which will, I hope, will still allow me to catch that late sunset.
There are lots of plans circling for future editions, presentations, and performances of Russia: Today (2020) in both the UK and now perhaps even the United States, and indeed, with the onslaught of new work, I am ever-mindful of the importance of nourishing the creations that already exist. It is all a little bit like summer itself- in full bloom, one wishes for it never to end, but even when it does come to a close, those memories live on a little bit better with occasional, if not frequent, reminders.
It’s been a wild few weeks – at one point, in a matter of just a few days, I had set foot on three different continents – and arriving home late yesterday evening after five flights in a row feels a bit like stepping off a rocking boat onto terra firma. Finally. But despite long-postponed family vacations, intense adventures into the Andean altiplano, and striving to keep up to date on creative projects both ongoing and future, I also can hardly believe it’s already the middle of June and half the year has somehow expired! New Vision Arts Festival will debut their 2023 program in the coming weeks, the lead act of which will be the HK premiere of The Once and Future (2021) with Anandi Bhattacharya and the Berliner Philharmoniker musicians in October.
But before the curtain comes down, I’ve got two interesting projects to commence with a third on the way- a collaboration with the Hong Kong Dance Company, curator Hing Chao, and the Chinese star cellist LiLa, and a new piece for the exceptional French Quatuor Arod, whom I had the pleasure to host in Hong Kong earlier this year as part of their residency at the HKBU Academy of Music. The latter project is a particularly exciting assignment considering I had really left behind writing chamber music for its own sake many years ago, so to return to the genre with one of the very best ensembles in the business is absolutely a pleasure. The former multimedia dance project will premiere already in December of this year at the City University of Hong Kong School of Creative Media
Next week, I’m off to the Salento and will juggle composition, admin work on existing and future projects (still more!), and finally finding a dream plot of land on which to build a home. But now, just now, it is so brilliantly good to be home and rarely have I felt less keen to hop on a plane again.