Raymond Yiu: Symphony

With Andrew Watts (counter-tenor) and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Edward Gardner.

‘When I first came to London in 1992, Aids was a big thing,’ says composer Raymond Yiu. ‘You went out on the scene, you’d see someone for a while and they’d disappear. Years later you’d discover that they were dead. It was horrible. And the younger generation don’t have any memory of this. For me it’s still very vivid.’ The central pillar of Yiu’s Symphony – a five-movement meditation on memory for orchestra and countertenor – is the fourth movement, which sets Thom Gunn’s club-scene poem to the lush orchestral sounds of 1970s disco. Around it four other movements grapple – through music and text – with the way our brains try to recover and hold on to the past. The influences are wide-ranging: Scarlatti, Berio, the Bee Gees, Basil Bunting, Nielsen and Mahler.