Wandering Illusion for sheng, clarinet, violin, viola,cello and piano (2016)
Diary V – Five Pieces for quarter tone piano (2013)
Imaginative Re ections for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (2015)

All tracks written and composed by Xiaoyong Chen
Jensen Horn-Sin Lam, artistic director, viola
Shuting Wu, violin
Yuan Zhang, cello
Cong Li, clarinet and piano solo (Diary V)
Xiangjun Yu, piano
Jing Yao, flute
Junjun Tian, violin
Jiannan Chen, sheng
Le Dai, clarinet

The sounds on this album seem to come from another world. They spread through space, then disappear, or rather: fade away, evaporate, crystallize, settle as a sedi- ment. This music is about fading away, about reverberations, echoes. European instruments sound Asian, and Asian instruments are integrated into European art music. Xiaoyong Chen, who emigrated to Germany in 1985, once a student of composition with György Ligeti and now a professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, never ceases to explore issues of identity, of belonging, including the fundamental question: Is it actually possible to understand a foreign culture? “A great sound is inaudible, a great image is formless,” Laozi’s famous observation, is printed in Chinese characters on the cover of this recording (by the Ensemble Les Amis Shanghai under the direction of Jensen Horn-Sin Lam).