“Raymond Yiu’s hugely impressive new symphony, commissioned for the Proms and introduced by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Edward Gardner, doubles as a song cycle. It was composed for countertenor Andrew Watts, and four of its five movements are settings of poems – by Walt Whitman, CP Cavafy, Thom Gunn and John Donne – that deal with loss and remembering, though their cumulative weight and coherence are convincingly symphonic too... It’s a finely wrought, bittersweet work, shot through with perfectly imagined detail.”

“Yiu never seems to write following a straight line. Yet this latest cat’s cradle beckoned us inside for 25 minutes with such ear-catching and tinkling sounds that it was a pleasure to be trapped in its maze. No shortage of variety, either: trapped in the maze were echoes of disco and Scarlatti... Despite the seeming spirit of caprice, every word that Yiu set mattered, from the sensuous caress of Cavafy’s Come Back, through the AIDS lament of Thom Gunn’s In Time of Plague, to the loving, emollient lines of John Donne that brought the symphony to rest in the musical equivalent of a heat haze. This was a most impressive new work.”

“This new work addresses in part the AIDS crisis that the world quietly forgot about, and sets poetry by Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, Thom Gunn and John Donne .Perhaps the most strikingly original thing about Yiu’s work is not that it is scored for countertenor and large orchestra, but that the singer becomes protagonist... Yiu’s magpie exuberance extends to the conjuring up of disco shuffle in the fourth movement, complete with amplified crooning from the singer. The BBC Symphony Orchestra responded with fluidity, guided with complete control by the conductor Edward Gardner; together with Watts he made the John Donne finale a moving epilogue, with its repetitions of the word “Everlasting” carried on consoling music. ”