In Bach’s Seat – An Interview with Felix Yeung

I. Childhood

Little Singers in Hong Kong

Despite not having been born in a musical family, Felix was nevertheless exposed to music-making since he was a toddler. “My mother was not a musician, but shortly after I was born she went along with a friend to Pro-Musica Society of Hong Kong to sing as opera chorus, even though she didn’t know how to read a score.” KC Lee (李建真), then the chorusmaster at Pro-Musica Society, would go on to form a choir for young children, Little Singers of Hong Kong, and so Felix started singing at the tender age of three. “KC introduced me to the world of music. Apart from singing, he also referred me to his violin teacher, Mr Cheng Chik-Pui (鄭植沛), who was one of the first few early Chinese in the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, although I didn’t take to the violin ultimately.”

The young Felix settled on the piano instead. “I started learning the piano when I was about eight years old, and didn’t stop until Form 5, where I passed the Advanced Music Certificates so that I could get full marks for my HKCEE music examination. But it was not too enjoyable for me, because throughout the whole year I would only be playing the three set pieces for that year’s exam.”

Jack of All Trades

Even by secondary school, Felix had already established himself as a multi-talented musician. “By the time I graduated from St Paul’s College, I was the Chinese orchestra leader and the choir leader, and I was also involved in the orchestra, and the madrigal group.”

It started with the yangqin. “When I first joined the school, the music teacher asked everyone to learn an instrument apart from the piano. I didn’t want to learn another Western music instrument, so I chose the yangqin.” Thanks to his piano background, Felix picked up the instrument with ease. “Everything is written on a single staff, and I just have to find the right notes and hit the right strings in time!”

With his newfound mastery of the instrument, Felix found himself recruited into the Chinese music ensemble for the Hong Kong Schools Music Festival competition, and it was there that Felix first tried his hand at conducting. “The yangqin is situated in the middle of the ensemble and most visible to everyone, so the music teacher asked me to cue the piece. This was my first experience leading a musical group, and by the end of Form 2 I was already conducting the Chinese orchestra for intraschool performances.”

Felix also dabbled in percussion. “The then head of music, Mr Raymond Fu, encouraged pianists to join the percussion section of the school orchestra, and so I was sometimes called upon to play drums or triangle in both the Chinese and Western orchestras. I remember learning how to play the paigu from scratch, and then leading the school’s paigu section in its 150th anniversary performance of Li Minxiong’s (李民雄) ‘Flying Dragon and Leaping Tiger’ (龍騰虎躍).”

Meanwhile, Felix found his calling at the church organ. “As a Sheng Kung Hui school, we regularly sang hymns during morning assemblies, which were always accompanied by an organ. I found the sound of the organ fascinating, because compared to the piano, where you need to put in a lot of work to achieve even a small difference in tone, you can achieve the same easily on the organ. It’s like having a whole orchestra at your hands.” Felix expressed his desires to the music teacher, and in Form 2 the school granted a scholarship to the promising student, sponsoring him to learn the organ under Mr Peter Yue.

Throughout these endeavours, Felix’s commitment to singing remained strong, albeit having transitioned to a more indirect role. “I sang in the choir at first, but my voice broke shortly after Form 1, so I became the choir pianist instead. This continued until Form 5, when Mr Fu assigned me to be the assistant choir leader and put me in charge of all the part rehearsals.”

All the time spent on extra-curricular activities forced Felix to settle into a hyper-efficient routine to handle his schoolwork. “I’ve got fairly good visual memory, so every time there would be an examination, I would just memorise everything the day before; and, because I needed to attend all these musical activities after school, I even did all my homework between lessons so that I could squeeze out some time after dinner to play games or chat on the phone.”

St John’s Cathedral

Felix’s first involvement with St John’s Cathedral also came from his secondary school life. “Mr Fu was then the choirmaster of St John’s Cathedral Choir, and he would often ask some of his more talented students to join him at the cathedral.” Felix was invited to sing in the Cathedral Choir from Form 4 onwards, and the experience opened his eyes to the breadth of choral music. “They sing a new piece every Sunday, from renaissance motet to pieces specially commissioned from contemporary local composers, and sometimes Mr Fu would even let me conduct the choir.”

By the time of Felix’s graduation from St Paul’s, he had already started to consider being a church musician. “I liked the organ, and I liked conducting. A church musician gets to do both, so it seemed like this would be the path for me.”

II. Bachelor’s Studies

JUPAS

Armed with his photographic memory and hyper-efficient routine, Felix scored three As in his A levels, no mean feat for the notoriously difficult examination. In Hong Kong, students with such good grades usually went on to become doctors or lawyers, but Felix opted for a path more radical. “My first choice in JUPAS [Joint University Programmes Admissions System] was the music degree in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), followed by pharmacy in the same university. I had the plan that, if I was not admitted to CUHK music, I would go for the pharmacy degree, but take music courses in the first year and transfer to the music department in the second year!”

Despite his stellar A level results, Felix was not entirely sure he would be admitted at first. “The music department would not admit anyone based on exam grades alone; we had to pass through an audition. It was a challenge for me because I had applied as an organist, but I hadn’t played on the organ for a year to prepare for the A levels.” At the end, Felix chose an organ piece he had learnt two years before, and, thanks to the strong foundations and ethos instilled upon him by the teachers at St Paul’s, he successfully entered CUHK music. “Mrs Sandy Ng, the teacher who taught me HKCEE music, was one of my greatest influences as a musician. She taught me that there are no concessions in music – even as an amateur musician, you still have to sound professional. You can’t just aim for the best but settle for something halfway towards the goal; when you are making music, you have to be all the way there.”

The saying resonated with Felix deeply. “Even today, I set the same expectation for my choirs, regardless of if they were children, students or amateur adults. Of course, I have to adjust my language depending on the occasion, but in the end you have to let them know that, despite their age or current abilities, they are no different from professionals, and it will be my job to facilitate them to attain the standards of a professional choir.”

CUHK Music

“I had been learning under Peter since Form 2, and all the way till the first term in Form 7. I stopped after having obtained my ABRSM Grade 8 qualification in organ that term. After finishing A levels, I was accepted by CUHK. I asked Peter in CUHK to be my teacher again but he refused. He insisted that there was nothing more he could offer me in CUHK, noting that I had begun to get saturated from his teachings. At the end, I studied under Ms Wong Kin-yu for my three years in CUHK.”

One of the distinguishing features of CUHK is its emphasis on “student orientated teaching”, and to Felix it was indeed an invaluable boon. “The tutelage of the CUHK faculty was excellent, and you could learn a lot if you are willing to pay attention during lessons, but my biggest benefit from CUHK, apart from the technical knowledge, was the opportunity to collaborate with my fellow CUHK music majors.” Felix recounted that, in his second year, one of his classmates wanted to open a recital of recitatives and arias, and enlisted Felix’s help to conduct the accompanying orchestra. “Recitatives were a beast to conduct because of the fluid nature of the singer’s part. Nobody had taught me how to conduct before but fortunately, despite my numerous blunders, the recital was a success.”

Felix was also the president of the Chung Chi Choir during his undergraduate studies (Chung Chi College was one of the four constituent colleges of CUHK back then). “It was a purely administrative role, but from there I built up camaraderie with my fellow jongmates [a popular Chinese transliteration for organising committee members], and I also got the practical experience of running a choir, which is definitely useful to my current role in St John’s Cathedral.”

At his final year in CUHK, Felix co-produced a musical with his classmates. “It was tradition to open a graduate recital and I had befriended some classmates from my time at the college choir, so we banded together and decided to produce a musical for the occasion, taking pieces from existing musicals and creating a new story out of them. We booked the Lee Hysan Concert Hall (the main performance hall in CUHK music department), whipped up a live band with me as the conductor, and we sang pieces from hits like Wicked, Sweeney Todd and A Spring Awakening. It was a culmination of what we’d learnt in those three years.”

III. Becoming a Choral Conductor

Auditioning for RAM

With his dream to become a church musician, Felix knew he had to learn choral conducting, and thus he set his sights on the UK. “At that time in St John’s Cathedral, there was an honorary organist, David Cooper, who was an organist at the Blackburn Cathedral before he came to Hong Kong. When I was about to graduate, I asked the Dean at St John’s Cathedral to connect me with him, and he introduced me to the schools of the UK – there was the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the Royal Northern College of Music, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, but in London there was only one conservatoire that taught choral conducting, the Royal Academy of Music [RAM].” Felix had an aunt living in London, so he was dead set on RAM. “It was all or nothing for me. I didn’t even apply for Birmingham.”

It is easy to envision an instrumental audition, but how would one audition for choral conducting? “In RAM, the audition involves a choir group of around 10 people, consisting of existing vocal students and even choral conducting majors, and I would be asked to rehearse and conduct a piece with them. The audition would be divided into three rounds, and in the first round, we were asked to prepare four set pieces, all polyphonies with two set in Latin and two in English, and one of them will be chosen at random on site.” The audition was a fresh experience for Felix. “In Hong Kong, I was often preoccupied with the correctness of pitch and rhythm during rehearsals, but in the audition there is nothing for me to correct, because all of them sang perfectly, so I just stood there, dumbfounded with nothing much to do during the whole audition!”

The second round of the audition involved a piece of Felix’s own choice. “I brought to them Cantate Domino by Vytautas Miškinis, a contemporary Baltic composer. It was not a piece on the usual choir repertoire, but again the choir sightread the piece and sang perfectly. Finally, the third round of the audition was an interview, where I got to chat with Paul Brough and Patrick “Paddy” Russill, the head of choral conducting. They asked about my musical experience, and gave me a few lines to sing by sight, a task which I definitely didn’t do well on! Fortunately, they still accepted me, and this started my two years of studying at RAM.”

Jam-Packed Schedules

Felix was indeed lucky to be able to enter the choral conducting department of RAM. “Conductor training requires one-on-one lessons and, with only one teacher, there could only be at most five students at a time in the choral conducting department. If it weren’t for three of them to be exiting the year I auditioned, I would not have stood a chance.”

Competition was fierce. “Most of the candidates and eventually my classmates were practising conductors, where they were usually already working in some choirs and were coming to RAM to improve their conducting skills. My classmates were usually older than me by at least five or six years, and there are seldom people like me who went in right after their undergraduate studies.”

The schedule for a choral conducting major was tightly packed. “We took conducting lessons three days a week. The mornings would be used for general classes like baton techniques or academic courses (I wrote about Gregorian chants for my first year and on reforms and traditions on my second year), whilst the practical lessons were spread across the afternoons so that Paddy had enough time to work with each student individually.”

There would be a change of pace on the third day. “On Wednesday afternoons, the lessons were shared with students from the organ department. To be exact, we were just singing and observing how Paddy teaches. At first, Paddy would teach them as usual but, as the term goes on, Paddy would ask us to comment on their conducting, putting us in the instructing role. He is teaching us how to listen, and how to articulate what we heard.” Paddy also had a hidden agenda for the class. “Paddy wanted us to collaborate more with organists, because as a choral conductor you inevitably have to work with organists, no matter in academy or in choral services, and life would be easier if we already knew each other to begin with.”

There were also generalist classes. “I remember there was one aural class that had an ‘atonal bingo’ where the instructor, David Petitt, would play snippets of atonal melodies, and we would need to yell out ‘bingo!’ once we successfully matched all the notes with that on the sheet. There was this another test where the professor would play in parallel three scales in different keys, each having one wrong note, and we had to spot that out. That class was a nightmare for someone like me, who doesn’t have perfect pitch!

“On top of all the choral conducting classes, I also needed to take research classes on Fridays to complete my master’s of music degree. That left Thursday to be my day off, which I used to practise my conducting skills by rehearsing with the Upminster Capella Singers, a local community choir full of sweet elderlies. It was certainly a very busy schedule.”

Learning from the Masters

Masterclasses are a staple for many music courses, and it is the same for choral conducting. “The BBC Singers would come for a masterclass every year at the start of the semester, and I’ve also been to masterclasses with James O’Donnell, Jeremy Summerly, Ben Parry, the Cardinal’s Musick with Andrew Carwood, and even Royal Holloway, though for the latter we didn’t get to conduct the Royal Holloway’s Chapel Choir.”

Coincidentally, masterclasses are also the reason for Felix’s active participation in various school functions. “We need chorus members for auditions and recitals, but they are usually filled with existing choral conducting students because it helps save the expense from hiring external singers, which means more masterclasses for us. That’s why we have a lot of incentives to volunteer. I remember in my first year I was the only one out of the four students who knew how to play the piano or organ, so the task to accompany the masterclass naturally fell on me, and then it turned out the piece for the BBC Singers masterclass was a double choir atonal piece, with an open score of eight rows, and I was expected to fill in the gaps by sightreading all the parts on the piano!”

Quality Advice

Throughout his two years as a choral conducting student, there was a piece of advice that Felix took dearly to heart. “Paul Brough once said that, as a conductor, we are here to encourage quality listening. Quality playing is essential on an individual level but, at the same time, choral singing is a group activity and quality ensemble can only be achieved by quality listening. As a conductor, you can’t just look, you need to listen to mould the choir into a cohesive whole. A lot of people think the conductor just waves his hand around in a choir, but sometimes you need to take half a step back; you are both with it and not with it.”

Felix also appreciated RAM’s teaching philosophy. “In America, the teaching is very systemic and compartmentalised, and you have to string everything together yourself, while in Britain it is more a learning by immersion. Once you immersed long enough into the culture and the environment, then you can absorb and know how to do everything yourself. Paddy’s teaching is on the principle but not on the way of doing it, and that’s why all his students are not the same. The way he makes you really understand something, it is life changing.”

IV. Organ Scholar

The London Oratory

“I originally planned to stay in London for two years only but, towards the end of my second year, Paddy was suddenly looking for an organ scholar for his church the London Oratory, because the organist was retiring. As the music director of the Oratory, Paddy wanted to take the opportunity to establish an organ scholarship. This happened in January, which is a difficult time to find a candidate on such short notice (because most organ scholars had already settled in November of the previous year), but it was the perfect time for me because I was graduating from choral conducting. That’s how I became the organ scholar of the London Oratory.”

Felix likened being an organ scholar to being an intern for the church’s organist. “The main duty as an organ scholar of the London Oratory is to accompany the junior choir and to assist the organist in all major services, from turning the pages, pulling the stops, to tidying chairs in the organ loft.”

Coming from an Anglican church, service at the Catholic London Oratory was something Felix was initially unfamiliar with. “The London Oratory has a strong commitment to uphold polyphony and to preserve the tradition of Gregorian chants, and everything is conducted in Latin which I didn’t know much at first. Fortunately, with repeated weekly exposure, I quickly picked up and understood most of the phrases.”

Leipzig

Being an organ scholar is not all work and no play. “As an organ scholar, I was awarded a stipend to learn the organ and to buy scores. There is even a stipend for a study trip which I took to go to Leipzig in Germany.”

Leipzig was a novel experience to Felix. “The choral conducting head of the Leipzig Musikhochschule, Roland Börger, brought me on a trip to the historical sites around the region. It was the first time I’d played an organ with a short octave [a construction technique where the keyboard and pedalboard are tuned to C-F-D-G-E-A such that the organist can play a tenth in the space of an octave].

“Another difference is the temperament. Most organs then were not in equal temperament, and playing early pieces on an instrument with period tuning made me appreciate them even more. For example, there is this piece by Buxtehude where I always found the chords bland, but when I played it on an historic organ it all suddenly made sense. Let’s say Buxtehude wrote a F sharp major chord, but in that particular organ there is no A sharp but only B flat, then when you play that chord you can immediately feel the tension in the air. Buxtehude used the temperament to express himself, but this would be something hard to understand if you haven’t played it or heard it first-hand.

“I didn’t get the chance to play in Thomaskirche but I did play on one played by Max Reger, and another one where Mendelssohn was supposed to have played on. Naturally I played Mendelssohn’s organ sonata on there, and it just made so much sense, because, unlike the piano, the dynamics on the organ aren’t controlled by touch but by the stops and mechanisms, which vary by organ, and so you will get a different experience every time you play in a different church.

“The highlight of the trip was a church with an organ that was reviewed, approved and signed off by J.S. Bach at St Wenzel’s Church in Naumburg. They preserved the bench that Bach sat on and allowed anyone to sit on it for a while, and there are even labels on the organ stops that have not changed since Bach’s time. It was magical to be able to say that me and Bach shared the same seat and played on the same organ.”

V. Q&As

Throughout the interview, Felix frequently interjected with some unique insights stemming from his dual role as a choral conductor and a church musician. Some of his responses are reproduced below.

C: Cindy Ho; F: Felix Yeung

C: Can you tell us more about your current roles in HKSKH?

F: Basically, it’s like Bach, but without the composing part [laughs]. I went back to Hong Kong after my two years of RAM studies. Initially, I worked as the sub-organist for St John’s Cathedral. At the same time, I was also appointed the Provincial Music Director of the HKSKH – it was a new post that HKSKH opened for me. Then I gradually took up more and more responsibilities. Moreover, upon the retirement of choirmaster Raymond Fu in 2015, the pastor felt the need for someone to oversee all the music groups but not just a choirmaster looking after the cathedral choir, I was then appointed the very first Director of Music for St John’s Cathedral.

As St John’s Cathedral’s Director of Music, I have to prepare the music, including hymns and anthems, for all the services every weekend – on Sundays, there would be a said eucharist at 8am, sung eucharists at 9am in English and 10.30am in Putonghua, a responsorial eucharist at 11.45am in English, another sung eucharist at 1.30pm in Filipino, and a non-predetermined service at 5pm to top it off.

In addition to my duties at St John’s Cathedral, I am also HKSKH’s provincial music director, and so during weekdays I need to plan occasional provincial services, determine all the music-related guidelines and policies for HKSKH, and organise sacred music courses in HKSKH Ming Hua Theological College. Additionally, if the year coincides with any anniversaries, I will be in charge for the celebration events, like the time where I had to organise a joint concert between our member schools and churches to celebrate HKSKH’s Silver Jubliee. There are a lot of job duties, and that’s before counting all the administrative work that comes with the worships at the cathedral, like printing all the scores, numbering the purchased copies, and preparing all the service orders. It’s only in recent years that we’ve hired someone to help ease my workload.

C: Do you help out with other functions at St John’s Cathedral?

F: At St John’s Cathedral, we host weddings and funerals for parishioners, but to uphold the solemnity of the cathedral we have strict rules for the music. For instance, choirs and music from other parishes are generally accepted, while live bands are generally not. I remember there was a couple who wished to enter the cathedral to the tunes of Darth Vader’s march! Of course that was not permissible, and it is my duty to advise them on this.

C: I heard that 2020 was a particularly stressful year. What happened?

F: It was Covid at the time, and people were not allowed to gather. Even so, services must go on, so we created one of the first online services in the world, and eventually every week we had to make seven clips, no matter live, pre-recorded or edited, and upload them to YouTube. Unfortunately, the gathering restriction meant that no more than two people could gather at a time, which wreaked havoc on the recording of four-part hymns. I have to wait for all the traffic outside the cathedral to die down, play all the hymns on the organ to a click track, then go back to the office, close all the doors and seal all the gaps, and sing each of the hymns one by one, part by part, before merging them together.

C: What are your considerations when accompanying a choir on an organ versus conducting an ensemble in a church?

F: The organist as an accompaniment is a special role, because in congregational singing the conductor won’t conduct, and the organist is half a conductor as well. In terms of the mentality, the organist and the conductor are actually quite similar, because both are leading the choir, only that one is leading from the organ and the other is from the podium. If the organist thinks like you, then things will go very smooth.

Such is the case with the organist of St John’s Cathedral, Jonathan Yip, and me because, even though he majored in English in Cambridge, he is also an organ scholar at St Mary’s Cathedral in Edinburgh, and our thinking is very in tune. Even as an accompaniment, you can’t always follow the conductor; you have to sometimes lead him also. It’s a dance.

C: Jumping to something more philosophical, do you think that we have to be a good singer to be a good choral conductor?

F: It would definitely help. I think the bottom line is that you don’t need to be able to play well but you need to know how to play. Let’s say you coach a string ensemble. If there is a specific sound you want to achieve, you need to know how the sound production works to advise them, say by putting more pressure on the bow or playing it closer to the bridge. It’s the same with choral conducting, and that’s why Paddy had us attend singing classes in RAM, because you don’t need to sound good but at least you need to have a correct idea of the vocal production, so that you can know how to request the singers.

On the other hand, one doesn’t need to go to every class to learn everything. If you have a strong will of what you want to get, the rest will follow. For example, I was mainly trained in choral conducting, so if you were to ask me to conduct an orchestra, I would not have the vocabulary to request them for the specific sound production. But what I can do is, I would use more general language to describe the sound I want and, if the orchestra is good, they can still follow and achieve the sound of your mind, and gradually you would pick up on what to ask for from each instrument.

C: What’s the difference between conducting a church service and a performance?

F: I don’t think there is any big difference. In fact, as a Christian, there is even more pressure to perform better in a church than in a concert hall, because in a church I am not only playing to the audience but to God, so it has to be better than anything else.

On the other hand, performing in a concert hall is much livelier, because in a recital the feeling is very different whether there are five people behind you or 500 people behind you. The audience is part of the performance in concerts as well, but this is not true in church services, because I am still worshipping God via my music, no matter how many people are in the church with me.

C: How do you prepare for a contemporary work from a living composer?

F: At Die Konzertisten, we sometimes performed works by living composers, who could be members of the choir that we commissioned for. In this aspect, it adds an extra layer of meaning to the piece, because the composer isn’t just anyone but someone who sang alongside you for all these times, and when you explore his or her music, you get to see another side of your friend, like how they would think, because music is beyond words.

There was once a member, Ernest Hui, who wrote an a capella requiem for Die Konzertisten. Ernest was usually a soft-speaking, low-key person in the choir, but the requiem was really powerful. Even though I had known him for 20 years, I never knew he could be so emotional and profound.

There is an additional boon from knowing the composer because, even though you might not know about his everything, there will inevitably be some familiar elements which can guide you to express the music easier. This is unlike Bach, who no one in the world really knows nowadays, and we are just guessing through the notes he had written down.

C: What are your plans for the future?

F: Many musicians in Hong Kong seem to accept the fact that worship music is something that should be provided voluntarily and freely, but when you look around the world it is actually a peculiarity not to have any full-time church musicians or even a full-time choir in any respectable city. Thus, it is one of my long-term goals to set up a professional choir group, not only in terms of quality but a choir where singers actually sing for a living, as in a full-time job like the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. This is what I am trying to do in Die Konzertisten, and what the conductor of Die Konzertisten, Sanders Lau, is independently trying to achieve with his own chamber choir, NOĒMA. ′

Interviewed by Vantage Music and written by Chester Leung.