• 1985 Born in Hong Kong
• 2007 Graduated from Music Department, The Hong Kong Chinese University
• 2008 Graduated from Music Department, King’s College London
• 2013 Doctorate in Composition from The University of York
• 2015 Hong Kong Sinfonietta Contemporary Music Research
• 2020 HKS Artist Associate
• 2020 City of Zurich Artist-in-Residence Programme for Young International Artists

Orchestras and festivals which have commissioned Kwong include:

• Lucerne Festival (2022)
• Hong Kong Sinfonietta (2009, 2014-2018, 2020-2023)
• Takefu International Music Festival (2018 & 2020)
• The Hong Kong Arts Festival (2017)

For any composer or musician, to have people who appreciate your talent is something precious. But to have someone who has faith in you and offers you opportunities when you are still green and unproven, that is something priceless. To me, Hong Kong Sinfonietta is such a presence.

My collaboration with Hong Kong Sinfonietta began in 2009 when I was 23, having just begun my studies abroad in the UK. I was invited by the orchestra to do an arrangement during a semester break in Hong Kong. Later when I finished my PhD in 2013, the first professional commission I received after moving back to Hong Kong was also from Hong Kong Sinfonietta. For that, I wrote the orchestral work As the Streams Never Cease. To my surprise and delight, my collaboration with Hong Kong Sinfonietta has not ceased ever since. I continued to write several more orchestral and chamber works for the orchestra, and among them, At the Very End of Old Dreams was taken by the orchestra to several countries on their European tour in 2017.

These collaborations with Hong Kong Sinfonietta have given me plentiful opportunities since an early stage to write for an excellent orchestra who is versed in contemporary repertoire. This has allowed me to develop and establish my personal voice. Such exposure is something to be dreamt of for any young composer. Many local and oversea collaborators I have had in recent years first knew of my music through these compositions I wrote for Hong Kong Sinfonietta. It has to be said that Hong Kong Sinfonietta is an orchestra who listens to their artists. In all of our collaborations all these years, I have always been given the greatest freedom I could have imagined. The many experiences from working with Hong Kong Sinfonietta have been, and will continue to be, an indispensable part of my life in composing. I can only consider myself extremely lucky to have had such a companion along this musical path.

I feel very honoured and grateful to have been appointed the Artist Associate of Hong Kong Sinfonietta this season. At the time of writing this message, I have just completed a new work, Pastoral – after we perish, written for the orchestra’s season-opening concert and European tour. Other than that, we are also brewing two other works that would jump out of the norms of usual orchestral commissions. In taking up this new role with the orchestra, I wish to create more new works that intrigue, and let our audience experience the creativity and immense possibilities that symphonic music embodies.

Charles Kwong   (April 2020)

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Charles Kwong is a composer from Hong Kong. Approaching music as collective experiential situations, his creative output focuses on orchestral music, instrumental compositions for musicians across diverse musical cultures, site-specific music and transdisciplinary works that depart from the paradigm of concert music.

Kwong’s music has been internationally featured in festivals such as Lucerne Forward, Ultraschall Berlin, Takefu International Music Festival, Ticino Musica, Festival International de Piano La Roque d’Anthéron, Marvão International Music Festival and ManiFeste, among other professional presentations. In recent years, he has been commissioned by ensemble recherche, Lucerne Festival, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME) and Hong Kong Arts Festival, among others. Other renowned groups and musicians who have performed Kwong’s music include the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble intercontemporain, Ensemble of Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Orchestra UniMi, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, Mario Caroli, Jeanne-Marie Conquer, Tadashi Tajima, Tosiya Suzuki, Colleen Lee, Edward Gardner, Yip Wing-sie, Christoph Poppen and Pierre-André Valade, and among others.

Kwong has developed a long and fruitful collaboration with Hong Kong Sinfonietta since 2014. Their artistic bonding, which included a two-season appointment as the orchestra’s Artist Associate in 2020-2022, has resulted in multiple commissions that have been showcased locally and as well globally in the orchestra’s overseas tours. With his role in Contemporary Music Research for the orchestra since 2015, he has also been contributing ideas to the orchestra’s planning in contemporary repertoire and commissioning.

In 2020-2022, Kwong was engaged by ensemble recherche for the collaborative project “the new recherche” on the subject of gentrification, for which he wrote Migrating Tracks which was performed in Berlin, Munich and Freiburg. For the 60th anniversary of the Hong Kong City Hall in 2022, he wrote the orchestral piece Lullabies for the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Edward Gardner, who hailed the work as “wonderful, having a beautiful, light, airy quality, lots of fantasy and a real underlying wistful beauty which the orchestra have really enjoyed indulging in”. In 2016 at their first ever performance in Hong Kong in the ensemble’s history, the Ensemble intercontemporain performed his sextet Lachrymae.

Kwong’s interest in site specificity and transdisciplinarity of music led him to leadership roles in several extensive productions in Hong Kong. He was the curator of HKNME’s “Our Audible City” (2018-2019) – a year-long project on the subjects of site-specific music, urban soundscape, sound collecting and sound maps – for which he wrote Atlas, a series of site-specific works tailored for six non-concert spaces in Hong Kong. His research in site-specificity of music subsequently led to the conception of Requiem (2020-2021) commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary, and Lifelike (2021), commissioned by HKNME for performances at the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Garden. In 2022, he was commissioned by the Lucerne Festival for Elsewhere, a site-specific composition for performances at the KKL Luzern Concert Hall; Luzerner Zeitung praised the world première of the work for “enchanting the concert hall”. For his research in site specificity, Kwong took artist residencies at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the Tai Kwun Contemporary Artists’ Studio in 2020.

Born in Hong Kong in 1985, Kwong in his formative years studied music at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and King’s College London, before earning his doctorate in Composition from the University of York in 2013 under the supervision of Thomas Simaku. His artistic development has benefitted significantly through the tutelages of Toshio Hosokawa, Francesco Filidei, Mauro Lanza and Oscar Bianchi, among others.

Kwong co-founded PROJECT21st with Sharon Chan in 2019 and has been its Artistic Director since then.

CHARLES KWONG’S WEBSITE