5 February 2024
Hong Kong, HKSAR

January somehow whizzed by already but last year’s final brilliant memory – the world premiere of Vivacissimo (2023) by LiLa with the Hong Kong Dance Company – has finally returned with a recording that I’m excited to soon share, once the video also becomes ready. For the next few weeks though, as the cool, somewhat grim weather settles over Hong Kong, I’ll be working on the new, rather concise, piece for Quatuor Arod which will already be premiered later this year. Reminded of the first weeks of the pandemic in 2020 during which I frequently went out to a local coffee shop to work on the sketches and the score of Russia: Today (2020) in contravention of the prevailing hysteria, I think it will be a beautiful thing to add one more double bar to the many works I completed in my Sham Shui Po apartment before I finally hand it back and move further afield in the SAR.

Also earlier this month, I found myself defending this place that I call home to a group of surly German academics who had duly imbibed the Western media propaganda that all things-China are bad and Western Europe (and its allies) are blameless. The reality is of course complicated and quite gray, and despite the fact that much of what goes on here is frustratingly provincial and occasionally even preposterous (HKCCO inviting the queen of banality, Alma Deutscher, for a disastrously-selling concert being this month’s cherry), Hong Kong is also a leader in arts funding and a place with a completely open and honest mind about what culture should and might be. The drastic and endless arts cuts that made it clear that I had no future in the United Kingdom attempting even the slightest ambitious project, or the unearned snobbery of much of the Western European music scene, these are of course also by no means representative of the countless incredible artists and organisations at the very cutting edge of art and culture. But that call was anyway a nice reminder that living here, results, not talk, matter.

Some other good news- the world premiere of Otherhood (2022) which I wrote across continents, but mostly during an incredibly inspiring time in India in the spring of 2022, will finally take place at the Musiikkitalo in Helsinki in autumn of this year. A number of large projects are anyway moving forward, as well as existing ones returning to the stage, especially in 2025-26. But if anything, I’m excited to have the chance to hear some new, smaller-scale projects be heard and shared this year across Europe and mainland China.