The process of composing is highly unpredictable and bears the symptoms of bipolar disorder – including weeks of staring at an empty sheet of paper and several setbacks, but also sudden breakthroughs, none of which can really be foreseen. When I started to compose my Cello Concerto, the second movement was the only one whose shape was completely clear from the outset; but when I started with the notational process it branched out in a disappointing direction – which is why I decided to write it anew years later. The gestation of my Piano Concerto took six months, with an ongoing high blood pressure as a result (I have always found it particularly hard to compose for the piano). My Sheng Concerto, on the other hand, was written in only eight weeks, albeit the actual composition process was preceded by two years of conceptual work, including coming to terms with that highly complex and peculiar instrument.

The composition process resembles by its nature a tightrope act between success and failure: no risk, no gain. Picasso was right when he declared that style is an enemy of art and that the only way to progress is to attempt something one hasn’t attempted before. In my opinion, the future of new music depends on whether experimentalism, as well as the eccentricies and unpredictability of the composing process, will continue to be tolerated. (Without such trust in the long-term value of experimentation the late Beethoven quartets might not exist, to name but a superlative example.) Our contemporary society, however, seems increasingly obsessed with immediate functionality, speed of information and mere media glitter; I am not sure whether this is an atmosphere in which the composition of new music can continue to thrive.

So far, I have written six instrumental concertos; my new disc, just released by Deutsche Grammophon, includes the premiere recordings of three of them. The Piano Concerto, a work of extreme complexity, is the earliest of these three. Compared to my other concertos, it has been very rarely performed – even though I personally prefer it to my Violin Concerto. The Cello Concerto is antithetical to my other concertos. Here all was about a confrontation, a ’psychological warfare’ between soloist and orchestra, while in my other concertos I instead sought to merge soloist and orchestra into a sort of a hyper-instrument. My Sheng Concerto was a special undertaking since it is written for the 3500-year-old Chinese mouth organ, a fascinating instrument capable of polyphony, chromaticism, microtones, chords and clusters. The sound might be described as a unique mixture of electroacoustic music with clarinet, organ and accordion sonorities.

I am enormously happy with the exceptional soloists featured on this recording. All three – Sunwook Kim, Alban Gerhardt and Wu Wei – are artists of the first rank who don’t shy away from the seemingly impossible; they are unafraid of taking risks and pay full service to the work without any trace of mannerism. (In the same breath I should also mention Viviane Hagner and Mei Yi Foo, for their world premiere recordings of my Violin Concerto and my Piano Etudes.) Such interpreters are a composer’s dream – and of course so is Myung-Whun Chung, undoubtedly one of our age’s greatest conductors. I was also highly impressed by the Seoul Philharmonic’s work and efforts. Ten years ago, the orchestra had little experience with modern repertoire, but since we launched a contemporary music series – which has included Korean premieres of works not only by Xenakis, Ligeti, Boulez, Murail and George Benjamin, but also by modern classics such as Debussy, Ives, Stravinsky, Janácek, Webern, Messiaen, Dutilleux and Lutoslawski – they excel in modern repertoire and play it as fluently as if it were composed by Mozart.