Conductor Yip Wing-sie on battling breast cancer and passing the baton at the Hong Kong Sinfonietta
Performing arts in Hong Kong

After 18 years as the orchestra’s music director, Yip was due to pass on her baton this year, but like her farewell tour of Germany, the pandemic has postponed her departure.

Looking back, the press release issued by the Hong Kong Sinfonietta in November 2018 has an almost vintage innocence. Under the headline “It’s time to pass the baton” was an announcement that the 2019/2020 season would be a swansong for its music director, Yip Wing-sie.

In April 2020, she would take the orchestra she would have led for 18 years on a tour of Germany, returning as Conductor Emeritus, and if a music director had not yet been appointed, German principal guest conductor Christoph Poppen would “oversee the artistic well-being of the orchestra”.

“We wanted to make it known to the world that we were looking for a successor,” says Yip, wryly, in a Wan Chai building where the Hong Kong Sinfonietta has an administrative office on the third floor. “And that takes a long time.”

The orchestra doesn’t have a permanent home. It rehearses in a room at the Cultural Centre but not on the stage, which is the Hong Kong Philharmonic’s domain. It performs in City Hall and stores its bulkier instruments – harp, double bass, drums – in a Hung Hom factory.

Yip Wing-sie in 1985, the year she became the second woman in 30 years to win the coveted trophy at the Besançon International Music Festival for young conductors in France. Photo: SCMP

On the seventh floor of the Wan Chai building there is an overflow room with musical scores filed in plastic boxes. This is where we are sitting, in a space surrounded by stacked-up chairs as if an entire cluster of people has been folded away, zapped or zoomed into another realm.

Yip has chosen an upright seat; years of conducting have strained her back. On October 5, she turned 60 and has had a baton in her hand since she was a Form Five student at Munsang College, in Kowloon City, when her pregnant teacher, reluctant to appear in public, asked her to conduct at a music festival.

Before the pandemic, about 500 people had applied to replace her in the music director position. A shortlist was prepared and invitations to Hong Kong were being issued when everything halted. April’s German tour, of course, was axed, Poppen could not travel and, by mid-September, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta had played before a live audience only once since January.

A little mournfully, Yip flicks through a 2020/2021 brochure to a listing for McDull’s New Year Carnival, which she is slated to conduct next February. (McDull is a cartoon pig much loved in Hong Kong and one of the orchestra’s Artist Associates.) A local connection is fundamental to the Hong Kong Sinfonietta and the new music director will have to absorb its particular flavour. On the brochure’s cheerfully frenetic pink cover is a cartoon of Beethoven, whose 250th birthday this year is being marked by cancellations. The German word Freude floats like a banner across the top: joy.

This is the second time we have met. The first was for an interview 18 years ago, just before Yip began as the Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s music director, on April 1, 2002. Although the orchestra had been founded by local musicians in 1990 it was not until 1999, when it was offi­ci­ally incorporated, that it appointed its first music director, Tsung Yeh. He was also music director of the South Bend Symphony Orchestra in Indiana, the United States, and for the following three years he shuttled between the two places.

In those days, the Hong Kong Sinfonietta was a part-time orchestra. But as Tsung Yeh’s contract came to an end, it aspired to become the city’s second full-time orchestra, after the Philharmonic. Part of its proposal for renewed funding from the Arts Development Council stated that its next music director would be a Hong Kong resident.

Bureaucratic hoop-jumping ensued. This went right down to the wire: like her departure, though on a less global scale, Yip’s arrival was a fraught business. When I interviewed her, about 10 days before her official start date, she had spent the preceding six months working out future programming but still was not certain there would be money for any of it, including her own salary. What had kept her going was faith in the Hong Kong Sinfonietta’s chief executive, Margaret Yang.

The Sinfonietta’s CEO Margaret Yang (left) with Yip. Photo: SCMP

Yip and Yang had met in 1986, when they had both started at the Hong Kong Philharmonic. The previous year, Yip had won first prize at an international competi­tion for young conductors in Besançon, France, and the Philharmonic had taken her on as resident conductor, a first for a woman. (One of the points Yip likes to make is that because Hong Kong didn’t have a tradition of Western classical music, it didn’t know enough to be prejudiced.)

Yang, a trained musician, was doing the Philharmonic’s marketing. Later, when I ask Yang how she had marketed her, she refers to Yip’s Farrah Fawcett hair. Famous for her role in the original, 1970s Charlie’s Angels television series, Fawcett inspired many a flowing, voluminous coiffure over the years. Publicity photos of Yip with a baton were intended to emphasise the feminine appeal of her authority – she conducts! and she has lovely hair! – to the conserva­tive Hong Kong public.

The Farrah flicks have long gone, but Yip, pert and bright-eyed, has changed remarkably little in 18 years, and she is still not the sort of baton-wielder who expects to be addressed as maestro (or even maestra). Being modest yet in control has been one of the balancing acts of her professional life.

When she was beginning her career, her father, Dr Yip Wai-hong, told her she must be humble and should try to please most people. He founded Hong Kong’s first children’s choir in 1969 and it was he who introduced her to public life. When the choir went on tour in the 1970s, Wing-sie would act as MC, “so talking to an audience came naturally to me”.

Dr Yip had studied at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Tianjin, where he met and married a fellow student, Choi Ching-yee. That was in 1955. Then, as his daughter puts it, “things really turned sour”. During the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1956-57, when citizens were invited to express their honest opinions about Maoist China, Yip – like many others – sadly took the bait and was sent to the countryside for his trouble. Eighteen months later, he returned home, albeit 40kg lighter.
Yip’s father, Dr Yip Wai-hong, leads the Hong Kong Children’s Choir in 1978. Photo: SCMP

His first daughter, Sincere, was born in Guangzhou in 1958, and Wing-sie was born two years later and brought to Hong Kong before she turned one. “My mother’s father was ill and she wanted to come back here to visit him. The authorities said, ‘OK but the kids stay.’ My mum said, ‘No, I’m breastfeeding, I have to take the young one.’ So my elder sister stayed as a hostage.”

Eventually, Sincere made it out – via Macau, with the help of her paternal grandmother – and a third daughter, Nina, was born in Hong Kong. (Wing-sie does not have an English name. She was Beverly, as in the Hills, for a year during English class at school, then dropped it.) All three were intensely musical. Sincere is now associate music director of Yip’s Children’s Choral and Performing Arts Centre and Nina is the principal répétiteur for Opera Hong Kong.

When Wing-sie went to London’s Royal College of Music (RCM) in 1978, it was primarily to study violin – conducting was the second string to her bow – but soon the minor subject began to take precedence.

At the time, David Willcocks was director of the RCM, and as Yip was the only woman who wanted to pursue conducting classes, he wrote to her parents. In 1982, he happened to visit Hong Kong professionally for a choral festival and met her father.

“David was one of the most popular classical musicians in Europe,” says Wing-sie. “So when the words of encour­age­ment came from him, it made everything bigger and more convincing for people who had doubts about it. To have support from my parents was very important.”

Yip as a young violinist performs at Hong Kong City Hall’s Concert Hall in the 1970s. Photo: LCSD

Wing-sie did her masters in violin performance and conducting at Indiana University Bloomington. (The geographical echo of Tsung Yeh is a coincidence.)

Theoretically, conducting still came second but she was given an end-of-year chance to conduct the university orchestra, “which was very rare for a second-study conductor”. On that occasion, she wore a trouser suit, a sartorial preference ever since. She has tried long skirts but says they hamper her movements on and off stage. “And you have to put on heels and I’m flat-footed.” Medically? “Yes!” She takes off her shoes, presses her bare feet to the floor, pointing out a bunion, the personification of down-to-earthness. “You see?”

As a student, she also conducted in a place of family reverberations: Guangzhou. She had gone back for the first time in August 1984, “because an opportunity is an opportunity. How often do you get 80 people to play for you?” It was a raw, sweaty, impoverished city and she was sick within a week, and the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1957, had its own troubles. There was no cohesion. The instruments were rough.

“Prepar­ation? Rhythm? Sense of pulse? No. It was a pickup orchestra. But the eagerness to learn was there. Even though I was a student, they thought, ‘Anybody trained in the West must have something to bring us.’”

The following year, Wing-sie won the top prize at Besançon, after which conducting came first. Her graduation recital in 1985 was her last solo violin performance. She says playing an instrument gives her stage fright, conducting does not.

Conductor David Willcocks taught Yip Wing-sie at Britain’s Royal College of Music. Photo: AP

She has remained loyal to the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra – she was its principal conductor and music director from 1997 to 2003 and still guest conducts. She was at the Hong Kong Philharmonic for 14 years, which, when she left, her father told her was too long. By then, she had married and had two children, now aged 31 and 25.

In 2002, she told me she wasn’t “pushy or ultra-ambi­tious” but the allure of the Sinfonietta was the thought of training her own orchestra and watching it grow. “For me, it’s about looking after this baby – no, not baby, toddler,” she said. “Maybe to help it grow into its teens.”

Which turned out to be true, though not of the orchestra, where the concerns have tended to be those of an adult, like hiring, firing and funding. It is Hong Kong audiences who she has had to nurture. In the early years, the process began with the “Shortcut to Classical Music” and “Know Your Classical Music” series, originally intended for office workers in Central and Admiralty “who like the idea of attending concerts but always have a feeling they don’t know enough”.

Narration, acting, sometimes dancing, were added to pep up proceedings. Parents began bringing their offspring. “We were happy to see them but that is not what we origi­nally had planned,” she says. Eventually there were so many children that separate programmes were provided for differ­ent age groups including, in 2009, babies “from zero to two”. How did she adapt to that? “Nobody’s trained to conduct for babies,” she says, with some feeling. “We had to learn.”

Students sing Glory to Hong Kong in a Lok Fu shopping centre on September 23, 2019. Photo: AFP

Hong Kong legislator Albert Ho Chun-yan recalls “the day of reunification” – the handover to mainland China on June 30, 1997 – when police drowned out demonstrators at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre by playing Beethoven at high volume (and not at all joyfully). Anyone who spent time at last year’s protests knows the powerful hold music had in rousing people. Wing-sie’s 18 years at the Hong Kong Sinfonietta have run in parallel with the growth not only of the young orchestra but a disenchanted generation of Hongkongers.

“I don’t know what the cure is,” she says. (Yip’s husband is a retired senior police officer, which has prompted unhelpful comments on social media.) “We don’t want to get into a political situation. The orchestra must remain neutral. Music should be for everyone.”

Is that possible? “Yes, I think so. Back in 2014, when the ‘umbrella movement’ was happening, we were still playing inside City Hall. A lot of people asked if I was afraid. I said, ‘Why? If it so happens they come in, then we would invite them to enjoy the music.’”

And yet, even for her, music has its limitations. In 2016, Yip disappeared for a while. At the bottom of the orchestra’s posters I remember a brief, barely visible, reference to an illness. “Hmm. I’ve never actually mentioned it to – the outside.” She hesitates, for a beat, then says, “I think it’s good if it will help people to be more aware. Exactly four years ago this month, I was diagnosed with breast cancer stage 1.”

In our working relationship, I’m always the bad guy. I don’t mind. I want people to love the music director
Margaret Yang, CEO, Hong Kong Sinfonietta

There had been no symptoms. Timing saved her: an annual check-up, a mammogram, an unexpected shadow. She had surgery a month later, then four weeks of radio­therapy. Now the rhythm this conductor wants to instil in your head is: get a check-up, get a check-up, get a check-up.

When I ask her what music she listened to during those anguished days, she laughs and says, “I didn’t listen to anything. I was just resting. Because for us, music makes me work. Then you can’t relax.”

The Sinfonietta may have played live only once between January and September, but on June 13, they recorded a City Hall concert titled “Back on Stage”. Yip conducted two of the four works, but did not use a baton, which might be a metaphor – has it already been passed on? – but it turns out is her preference for just 35 string players.

“Fingers and hands are more expressive,” she explains, after a recent screening in Pacific Place. Poppen, freshly quarantined and ready to assume temporary duty, is in the audience. (To make up for the lack of humans on-screen, he notes that City Hall’s front seats are occupied by 225 stuffed McDulls.)

The Q&A is conducted by Margaret Yang, a droll and highly capable presence. Standing next to Yip, the pair could be sisters. Yang is slightly younger but as chief executive, carries that commanding air of the elder. When we meet at Starbucks a few days later, having already jotted “good cop/bad cop?” in my notebook, Yang broaches the topic first: “In our working relationship, I’m always the bad guy. I don’t mind. I want people to love the music director. People don’t know who I am and it doesn’t matter.”

Yip conducts the Sinfonietta. Photo: SCMP

Long before Yip joined the Sinfonietta, her parents lived in the flat above Yang’s parents. When the Yangs sold, the Yips bought and Wing-sie moved in. Her parents still live above her; Dr Yip is now 89. I had an impression of Yip – the Talent – being facilitated throughout her life by circumstance, but Yang is quick to counter. “Oh, she’s tough inside … How can you be on that podium if you’re not tough?” she says.

Still, as Yang points out, when they reconnected after their Philharmonic years, “I was surprised she was the same person, very genuine. As time went by, I’d say to her, ‘You’re the big boss now, you don’t have to be so nice.’”

Yip had assured me the two had arguments and Yang scoffs nicely at this news, giving a few examples of low-key differences of opinion. Most of the time, she insists, they have been completely, intuitively, in tune. When I suggest that might be daunting for the new music director, Yang replies, “And also daunting for me.”

We walk over to City Hall, where Poppen is preparing 56 orchestra members for another audience-free recording, to be shown in cinemas in November. Yip is somewhere inside. “It’s not a job spec but she knows when there’s no real music director, she has to carry on overseeing things,” says Yang.

“So it comes from a sense of honour?” I ask.

“So it’s more beautiful,” says Yang. “It’s gone to another level.”

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