24 November 2023
Hong Kong, HKSAR

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.