About this work:
CHEN YI (b. 1953)
Dreaming of My Hometown for Guitar and Orchestra (2023)
DURATION: APPROXIMATELY 10 MINUTES
Chen Yi's Dreaming of My Hometown for Guitar and Orchestra was commissioned by Lakeside Arts with funds generously supplied by the University of Nottingham Confucius Institute and Cascade: funding transformative student projects thanks to donations from alumni and friends of the University of Nottingham. First performed by Xuefei Yang and University of Nottingham Philharmonia on Feb. 24, 2024, at Djanogly Recital Hall, University of Nottingham UK.
Instrumentation: Guitar solo, 2 flutes (2nd = piccolo or bamboo flute), 2 oboes, 2 B flat clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 C trumpets, percussion (suspended cymbal, triangle, and wood block), harp (or zheng), and strings.
The guitar solo starts the music with the tune of the popular Cantonese children's song Bright Moonlight, which the composer remembers from her hometown Guangzhou, China. The thematic material is developed throughout the piece, with the dialogues between the guitar and the orchestra in the textures, sometimes lyrical and sometimes virtuosic, to express the composer's nostalgia in her soundscape.