5 Minutes with Violinist Hongyi Mo

By Laurence Vittes | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings

Detroit Symphony violinist Hongyi Mo’s debut album, an all–Francis Poulenc recording titled Métamorphoses, could hardly be more Parisian (despite his not speaking any French). The title suggests not only an appropriately Gallic meditation on change but also Mo’s own exploration of how music shifts when it crosses boundaries—voice or oboe to violin, text to sound, analysis to emotion.

At the heart of the program lies Poulenc’s great Violin Sonata; it was Mo’s teenage crush, remains his enduring touchstone, and here serves as the anchor for an exploration of transformation. In counterpoint stands the Oboe Sonata, Poulenc’s final work, with its eloquent concluding Lament. Mo had long been fascinated by the expressive possibilities represented by the violin, and together the two sonatas embody a duality of first love and final farewell.

Mo places his own transcriptions of ten Poulenc songs alongside the two sonatas. These are not embellishments but experiments: Which pieces can survive without their words? How might violin and piano hint at text and breath without imitating the human voice? Where might dangers lie?

The playful, tender, melancholy results trace Poulenc’s mercurial spirit while binding the two sonatas. In the process, Mo reimagines not only Poulenc but also himself: memory transformed into sound, and sound into a personal vision.

At first disorienting, the experience gradually opens into something different altogether, the juxtaposed moods of the tracks shaping their own unique continuity—intensified by a recording of striking clarity, right down to the 20 seconds of reverberation that linger after the Violin Sonata’s final pizzicato snap.

Your debut album is entirely devoted to Poulenc. How did that come about?

The truth is, my dream project was the Ysaÿe sonatas. But when I had a chance to record my first album, and Ysaÿe wasn’t ready, I immediately thought of Poulenc. I also listened to all 156 songs. With my producer Alan Bise and pianist John Etsell, we gradually narrowed it to ten songs, framed by the violin and oboe sonatas.

What inspired you to include the Oboe Sonata?

I love the piece and have always felt it should be a violin sonata. Ironically, later on, when I really started to learn the piece and tried to imitate the characteristic polished, bright oboe sound, I learned that a violin can’t imitate an oboe. So I decided to focus on capturing the mood and space of my violin, as if the piece had been written for it. I still feel it is risky to play, and I am questioning whether I chose the lower register instead of the higher too often, but I am also still a huge fan of trying.

And then came the songs. What attracted you to them?

Poulenc always had the text in front of him. I can see him sitting at the piano, playing and reading these poems. So the poem always comes first. Some songs are very strange because of the text—not suitable for an instrument—but some are so pretty, buried in a song cycle. They are like the best French wines, but it seems like they’re trying to pretend they’re Pepsi. He tries to sound simple, even like a pop song, but there is so much depth. You can categorize it as easy-listening music, but you can go deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Like one song called “C,” about the Nazi occupation of his city. The sadness is infinite. Or in “Hôtel,” the sunlight, cigarette smoke, and ennui of a Paris attic. That’s what drew me in.

What was transcribing the songs like?

It was actually pretty painful because I kept worrying that it wouldn’t succeed, that it wouldn’t work without the texts. With text, there’s soul, but what I was doing might’ve been taking the soul of the song away. 

What kinds of technical problems did you run into?

We decided to keep the original keys in order to preserve the sonorities Poulenc intended, but the register choices became very frustrating; the songs were written for baritone or soprano, so if I were to play certain passages violinistically in a higher register, the color and imagery, the effect might seem distant. So sometimes I just played in the lower octave.

Repeated notes were also hard to deal with. When accompanying text, each repeated note can mean something new. But alternating bow strokes can easily sound mechanical, so I had to find ways to keep the integrity of each repeated note whenever the text shifted. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes not.

And the Violin Sonata—how does it fit this idea of metamorphosis?

When I heard it for the first time, it was in China on the radio in a recording by
Isabelle van Keulen, and I was 13. It was like perfume—I had never heard anything like it. Unconventional, lyrical, percussive, like vocal music and instrumental music at the same time. When I finally saw the score years later at Oberlin, I was 18, and it felt like meeting an old friend.

Why did you make this recording?

This album was for us, the performers. These days, with all the competitions and TikTok and Instagram followers—it seems like everything is for other people. But as musicians, as artists, we need more nourishment, more of being human rather than just being great players. That’s what I wanted from this.

What comes next?

Our next albums are going to be similar approaches to Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, and in the future, possibly Schoenberg. And John has tons of ideas about opera . . .