This portrait gathers four orchestral works by the Chinese composer Xiaogang Ye: a violin concerto, a tone poem, a concerto for the pipa and a symphony with two voices. Ye draws on the traditional music of China, from popular melodies and motifs of Beijing opera to the scales of Chinese art music and its instruments, and sets them in the colours of the Western symphony orchestra.

Ye was born on 23 September 1955. He studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing from 1978 to 1983 and at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester from 1987, and his teachers include Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Louis Andriessen and Alexander Goehr. Since 1993 he has divided his time between Beijing and Exton, Pennsylvania, which fits the Schott description of a regular commuter between continents and an aesthetic wanderer between East and West. The orchestra throughout is the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken. Yi Zhang conducts the violin concerto, Winter and the symphony; Günther Herbig conducts the Pipa Concerto. The soloists are the violinist Wei Lu, the pipa player Wu Man, the soprano Yanyan Wang and the baritone Song-Hu Liu.

The Last Paradise op. 24, for violin and orchestra, runs for sixteen minutes in a single movement. Winter op. 28 is a shorter orchestral piece of about eleven minutes. The Pipa Concerto op. 31, in four movements, puts the Chinese lute at the centre of the orchestra, the clearest case of the traditional instruments the Schott text mentions. Horizon, Symphony No. 2 op. 20, is scored for soprano, baritone and orchestra and lasts nineteen minutes.

The Schott text stresses Ye's penchant for the sonic possibilities of the symphony orchestra, where he finds the colours, harmonies and rhythms for the narrative aesthetic he looks for. His works, several film scores among them, have won international prizes, and his honours range from the Alexander Tcherepnin Prize in 1982 to a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012. He was the first Chinese composer to sign with Schott, later served as a vice president of the Central Conservatory and founded the Beijing Modern Music Festival. His Starry Sky was heard at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

CD, Wergo WER 6646 2, released in 2004 in the WERGO Colours series, running 66 minutes.