Yiu - The World Was Once All Miracle; etc review | Andrew Clements's classical release of the week

The Guardian 0

Williams/Watts/BBCSO/Davis/Gardner/Robertson
(Delphian)
Three works by Raymond Yiu highlight his instinctive originality, in evocative instrumental writing that is part game, part travelogue

Though it provides the overall title for this first album devoted to Raymond Yiu’s music, The World Was Once All Miracle is arguably the least convincing of these three orchestral scores. A song cycle to poems by Anthony Burgess, it was commissioned for the writer’s centenary in 2017, and first performed at the Manchester international festival that year. Though it certainly makes a more positive impression in this recording (taken from a later performance, conducted by Andrew Davis, with baritone Roderick Williams as the brilliantly articulate soloist) than it did at the premiere, the music still seems less personal and vital than the works flanking it, as though Yiu’s concern to register the wide range of Burgess’s talents had inhibited his own instinctive eclecticism.