Wong On-yuen

The Concertmaster and Assistant Conductor of the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra, Wong On-yuen graduated from the secondary school affiliated to the Central Conservatory of Music and the China Conservatory where he was trained by Nie Jingyu and Professor Lan Yusong.

Apart from giving performances with the HKCO and performing solo in China, Southeast Asia, North America and Europe, he has held more than a hundred huqin solo recitals since 1978, including the 1983 Taiwan début at the International Arts Festival and a widely acclaimed recital at the Carnegie Hall in New York (1991). His most well-known piece is Butterfly Lovers, which has been performed for more than 130 times. Wong has performed with such orchestras as the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra of Japan, Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra, Taipei Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai and Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, Chinese National Orchestra, Central Broadcasts National Music Orchestra and so on.

Wong has a diverse career that goes beyond playing the erhu. He is also a programme coordinator, conductor, arranger of music, teacher, arts assessor, radio host and writer. He has appeared on television, radio, newspaper and magazines, doing promotion for the Hong Kong Government as well as for commercial enterprises. He is also a keen participant in major charity shows and community events.

Wong has 27 solo recordings and was the producer of 26 albums of Chinese music. The Huqin world of Wong On-yuen (1984) and the recording of Toasting Song (1987) won the Gold Tripod Award for the Best Performance (the first ever presented by the Taiwan Government Information Office) and Best Recoding respectively. Some other awards he gained include: Hong Kong’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons (1985); Performer of the Year Award (the Hong Kong Artists’ Guild, 1989); Most Outstanding Asian Artists Award (the Chinese-American Arts Council of New York, 1991); Album of Best Performance Award for the album Wong On-yuen and the Twelve Kinds of Huqin (Taiwan’s China Times Evening Post, 1992); Outstanding Gentlemen (the RED company, 1990). He was made an MBE (a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1997. Wong was on the cover of Strad, the world’s leading magazine on string music and People’s Music, the leading music magazine in China.

The New York Times has this to say of Wong’s performance, “…The huqin family of the Chinese strings seems to have opened up for Westerners a more refined and intricate space in art… the variety of tone colour he produced was enough to make a listener momentarily regard the four strings of the violin as needless luxury.”