East meets West to powerfully revelatory effect
The Strad Issue: September 2026
Description: East meets West to powerfully revelatory effect
Musicians: Patrick Yim (violin, viola) et al
Works: Chen: Xian Shi; Suite. Zhou: Bamboo Grove; Tales from the Nine Bells
Catalogue number: PENTATONE PTC518586
Many performers profess an ‘east-meets-west’ eclecticism on disc, with varying degrees of success. Honolulu-born violinist Patrick Yim, however, peers deeply into the blurry meeting points of Orient and Occident with exceptional results.
Composers Zhou Long and Chen Yi were born in China within months of each other. Both endured the brutality of the Cultural Revolution, marrying in 1983, and later relocating to the US. Yim’s collection features two works by each composer, demonstrating their distinctively individual voices, which draw heavily on their Chinese musical roots while revelling in a whole catalogue of more modern Western techniques.
Drum-like pizzicatos and whistling harmonics, for example, are among the many sonic effects in Zhou’s playful, theatrical Bamboo Grove for solo violin, and Yim responds to the piece’s larger-than-life musical imagination with appropriately free-flowing fantasy. From soloist, Yim steps back into a vivid ensemble for Zhou’s equally effusive Tales from the Nine Bells, matching his colleagues in haunting otherworldliness and sometimes brutal aggression.
Chen’s duo of works are more conservative in style, though no less eloquent. Yim swaps his violin for a viola in Xian Shi, effectively a high-energy concerto for the instrument with a glittering, pounding backdrop of piano and percussion.
He’s a passionate soloist in the Suite for viola and chamber winds, persuasively embodying a quartet of traditional instruments across its four movements. The playing is captured in close, warm sound.
David Kettle
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