Ching, Jeffrey

The Chinese-Filipino-British composer Jeffrey Ching was born in Manila, studied music, Sinology, and philosophy in Harvard, Cambridge (UK), and London, and now lives in Berlin. He has represented the Philippines in three cultural delegations to China, and in 2003 was the first composer to receive the Jose Rizal Award for Excellence from the Philippine president. His Third Symphony, “Rituals”, for three orchestras, was commissioned by the Philippine government in 1998 to mark the Centennial of the Philippine Declaration of Independence from Spain.
In Germany Ching’s opera “Das Waisenkind” won the Theater Erfurt Audience Prize in 2010, and was followed by his nomination for the Kyoto Prize. The opera was enthusiastically acclaimed in the German and Austrian press: ‘Keine Literaturoper im engeren Sinne, kein Opernschocker abendländischer Provenienz, vielmehr der Versuch, aus verschiedenen Quellen der Weltkulturen, ihren Sprachen, Geschichten, ihrer Musik eine Art Welt-Raum-Musik-Theater zu filtern, das uns an einem Stoff aus dunkelster Vorzeit eine zeitlose Menschengeschichte näherrückt’ (Gerhard Rohde, Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, 02.12.2009).
In November 2013 Ching’s “Diese So-Geliebte”, an ‘incantation’ for mezzo-soprano, baritone, eight percussionists, two orchestras, and two conductors, was premiered at the Impuls Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt—a technical tour de force with the two halves of the score simultaneously performed and broadcast live by Deutschlandradio Kultur from Dessau and MDR Figaro from Magdeburg.
In March 2019, Ching’s chamber opera “The True Story of King Kong” was premiered in a co-production of Magdeburg Opera and Magdeburg Puppet Theater (Germany). It was nominated for the prestigious Fedora-Generali Prize for Opera and won the Fedora Platform Prize for Public Vote 2018. In November of the same year, Ching was commissioned to write “Fenghuang Singing” for the IMPULS Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt to commemorate thirty years of German unification.

Ching likes to work within historical parameters. “Horologia sinica” required the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra to tune only to mediaeval Chinese non-tempered scales. For Berlin’s Modern Art Sextet, he re-composed and completed the Mozart-Süßmayr “Requiem” fragment as “A Chamber Requiem”. His other Mozart completion, the “Sinfonia concertante in A” for violin, viola, and cello, KV Anh. 104 (320e) has been performed by the Dresden Staatskapelle, the State Academic Symphony Orchestra ‘Evgeny Svetlanov’, and the Alexandria Symphony Orchestra. He has written two completions of the unfinished Contrapunctus 14 from J. S. Bach’s “Die Kunst der Fuge”. For the Mandelring Quartet’s Asian tour in 2017, he composed “Quartett-Dissonanzen”, a metaphysical commentary on Mozart’s “Dissonanzen-Quartett”.
Ching’s music has been featured in “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” and on rbb Kultur, Deutschlandfunk, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and MDR Kultur. His compositions have been premiered at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Impuls Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt (Germany), the KlangZeit-Festival Münster (Germany), the Mendigorría International Music Festival (Spain), the ICon Arts Festival (Romania), the Edison Denisov Festival (Russia), the Shanghai Arts Festival, and the Hong Kong Arts Festival. He was composer-in-residence at the Tongyeong International Music Festival (South Korea) in 2010, the Singapore International Festival of Music in 2016, and the Mendigorría International Music Festival (Spain) in 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2023.
At the invitation of their new music director Grzegorz Nowak, Ching is composer-in-residence of the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra for their 2024-25 season, and his “Il maestro di cappella” was expressly written to open each concert of the orchestra’s nine-city UK tour in May 2025.
Ching originally composed the opera “Before Brabant”, a ‘prequel’ to Wagner’s “Lohengrin”, for a concert performance at the 2013 Hong Kong Arts Festival, and it finally received its scenic premiere with animation and lighting effects directed by multi-nominated Mexican director Alberto Rodriguez at the Children’s Biennale in Manila in November 2024. Other forthcoming works include the opera “The Butterflies”, to be premiered in Chengdu (China) in July 2025, and new opera projects for the Impuls Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt in 2026 and for the re-opening of the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 2026-27. He is currently working on a re-composition of Schubert’s “Winterreise” for solo cello and voice in collaboration with Achim Freyer.