Behind the curtain of Genshin Impact’s charity concert with Vijay Upadhyaya

“This bloody Genshin Impact is difficult to play.”

HoYoverse

The university I attended looked like it was initially built as a bunker for the Cold War, so I could only stare with jealousy at the splendor and history displayed at the University of Vienna when I entered the building – and even more so when I stepped into the Great Hall with its high ceiling having been painted by Gustav Klimt himself. Back then, his critics called the art for this room pornographic – my only complaint was a strained neck from looking at it too long. I wasn’t here for the gorgeous paintings, though.

HoYoverse had generously invited me to attend the Genshin4Good charity concert in Vienna on November 11, 2024. One day before the show, I had the chance to attend a lecture at university, which introduced me, fellow journalists, and attending music enthusiasts from the city to some of the special instruments that would be used on the next day along with their talented owners – that entire thing turned out to be not only extremely interesting, but basically became a little concert of its own, with all the musicians giving us a taste of what their partners could do.

But before that, I had the opportunity to speak to Vijay Upadhyaya – the man who’d masterfully wield the Philharmonic Orchestra of the University of Vienna like his own instrument during the concert.

Lisa, Barbara, and Albedo are the three mascots for this year's concert. / HoYoverse

Upadhyaya is the official conductor of the orchestra and has been for “30 academic years,” as he puts it. It’s one of many positions he’s attained over the years around the globe. Born in 1966, he doesn’t look his age of 58 at all – he has a spring in his step and always a warm smile or a joke on his lips. Wearing a Trachtenjacke, a traditional jacket in Austria and Bavaria, and with a noticeable Austrian twang to his German and even his English, you’d think he was born in the Alpine republic.

“I’m kind of an Indo-Chinese Austrian,” Upadhyaya explains, breaking into laughter. Born in the city of Lucknow in India, he came to Austria at a young age on a scholarship, studying in Graz and then in the German cities of Weimar and Berlin.

Upadhyaya started learning his first instrument – the piano – from his mother when he was four years old. He didn’t have much of a choice, he says. The story of how he got into conducting is “very strange,” according to himself. “It sounds like a story from the Arabian Nights.”

He initially wanted to become a botanist and then a composer, but fate intervened – in the form of his school principal and his mother. They were both acquainted with each other from their time in school, so one day the principal had asked her to look after the school choir, since the position of music teacher was currently vacant at the institution Upadhyaya visited. Being a lawyer, she said she was too busy, but promptly suggested her son for the job. 

“So I was thrown into choir-conducting at the age of 14 with boys sitting there who were 16, 17,” Upadhyaya recounts. “You can imagine how difficult that was. That’s how I started conducting.” He tried his best to apply his knowledge from playing the piano to conducting without any formal training or outside help. 

“At that time it was completely self-taught,” he says. “The wife of the school principal had to sit there for discipline, because I couldn’t control the people there.”

Vijay Upadhyaya and his orchestra delivered a magical performance on the day after the interview. / HoYoverse

Things have definitely changed for the better in this regard. Conducting an orchestra can be a bit like being a drill sergeant, especially when dealing with musicians from all around the world that don’t necessarily have much experience in the “European way of working.”

“You have to somehow discipline them into this orchestra thing,” Upadhyaya says. For Genshin Impact, he and the orchestra had 30 hours of joint rehearsals alone, not even counting the time that everyone put into it individually.

Upadhyaya explains that a frequent problem for professional orchestras, which are supposed to play video game soundtracks, is that they underestimate the difficulty of those pieces: “When they play a Beethoven symphony or a Mahler symphony, they have this reverence, [they know] it has to be practiced and exact. For a video game they’re like ‘Ah, it’ll work out’ and they don’t practice enough. And this bloody Genshin Impact is difficult to play. It’s not easy to play. You really have to work for that.”

He recounts how he had to schedule additional rehearsals for last year’s concert, because the music proved to be such a challenge for everyone.

In a way, HoYoverse found the perfect man for this challenge in Upadhyaya. Because of his heritage, he wrote his own first symphony based on Indian music and languages, while his second symphony featured Chinese instruments. “I’ve been doing this all the time anyhow. I’ve also done some film and video music, which has guitars and all that, so I’ve done this,” he says.

Most of the work for the conductor – around 80%, Upadhyaya estimates – happens before the concert, but that doesn’t mean that the job is all about showmanship during a performance.

“It depends on the personalities,” he explains. “There are some people who don't have that showmanship and some people who do it more. In this concert I’m conducting tomorrow there’s no time for showmanship, because there’s so much happening and there are so many different instruments. The more you think that something could go wrong, the less showmanship you can have, because you have to focus on what’s happening and not how you look.”

He adds: “Sometimes it happens that you make a mistake as a conductor or the musicians go off randomly. It’s a very technical thing to put this together. Tomorrow in the concert there are six or seven different kinds of flutes that are playing. It’s already an occupation to get those flutes, where to put them, how loud they are, all that kind of stuff. You’re so busy with technical stuff, especially in this concert, that there’s no time to produce yourself in any way.”

For Upadhyaya, this year’s concert involved less individual preparation than the first iteration, as two-thirds of the set list are identical. He says that classical conductors are always ready for something like a Beethoven symphony, which they know like the back of their hands. “You can hang me up upside down and I can conduct that,” he jokes. “But this stuff you have to prepare.”

For video game music to be recognized as an art form in itself, Upadhyaya says, an important step is to have experts who are willing to put in the work and be prepared for this type of music.

Upadhyaya puts his fullest efforts into whatever he does – and he does a lot. He’s the type that can’t stand still for long and his travels around the world have perfectly prepared him for challenges like the Genshin Impact soundtrack.

“I worked in Africa for a long time and so I traveled through ten countries in Africa. After college and [living in] this bourgeois Austria here sitting in the center,” he says, waving his arms at the richly decorated interior of the room, “I could have gone and been more in Europe, but I wanted to go to Kinshasa, to Congo, and do something. I went to Tajikistan and did a women's project. I founded a women’s orchestra in Iran until they threw me out and didn’t give me a visa anymore.”

“Europe is slow and you have to have some dynamics in your life. I have to go back after living in this Vienna complacency, eating cake and drinking coffee. I have to go to New Delhi or Shanghai to get some life back into me,” he says.

We need music and art to build bridges.

- Vijay Upadhyaya

Upadhyaya has great respect for the charity work HoYoverse is aspiring to do with projects like Genshin4Good and Impact4Music: “This company is not only an inspiration for musicians, it’s an inspiration for youth in general, I think.”

“We need music and art to build bridges,” he continues. “You see what’s happening in the world. What should I say about Gaza? I have no solution. I keep thinking about it. What should I say about it?”

“There is a guy from Syria who’s playing the oud here and we don’t know what his history is,” he explains. “There’s someone from Iran here and someone from Turkey. We have Russian musicians and Ukrainian musicians here. I’m not here to make politics. Genshin’s music combines all of these musicians.”

One of the brainchildren Upadhyaya might tackle one day is “to have a gamer’s orchestra that gets musicians worldwide who play the game to come together.”

Speaking of playing, Upadhyaya did actually try Genshin Impact after being introduced to it, but he admits that he didn’t have the patience to go through it for more than a few hours.

I ask him what Mozart or Beethoven might think of the concert on the next day, were they to sit in the audience. 

“Technically, the music – I’ll be honest – 70 to 80% are good compositions,” he responds. “Some of them don’t fit into the format of a concert, because they are seen as accompaniment to something that's happening in the video game. Last year, we had some music in the concert that was not good for the concert format, so we removed that this time. But 70 to 80% are good compositions. The orchestration is good and the composition structure is also good. One notices certain parts that are done for a studio format, so that doesn’t fit into a concert format sometimes.”

Sounds like the old masters would have a decent time with it then, no? Upadhyaya didn’t adapt or rearrange anything for the concert, despite seeing some areas that could be improved for the format. “I know the composer, Dimeng [Yuan], who’s done Natlan and Fontaine. I have not talked to him [about it], but there are certain things that could be better in a real format, for example if the choir would be an octave higher or something like that. It’s too new for me to make any changes.”

Upadhyaya actually wanted the Chinese composer to come to Vienna: “Natlan is especially why I wanted Dimeng to come. I’ll kick his ass, because he didn’t come. I told him to come, because he’s a Chinese guy living in this electronic world in Shanghai and he’s never gone to really listen to a live African choir. So I wanted him to come to see a European choir trying to sing the African thing. He has the idea of a new choral sound in his head, which the other guy didn’t have.”

“The other guy” is former HOYO-MiX composer Yu-peng Chen, who worked on the soundtrack up until and including Sumeru before going independent. Upadhyaya says that the composers’ works are like “a different language. You see that. It’s just another guy.”

That surprised me, since the Genshin community in general seemed to have noticed very little in terms of musical style changes. For Upadhyaya trained eyes and ears, it’s obvious. He points to the Great Hall with its paintings by Klimt on the ceiling and says: “If you look at Klimt and Schiele in the same period of time, you see it is a different language.”

His own favorites from the Genshin Impact soundtrack so far are Rage Beneath the Mountains and Wrath of Monoceros Caeli, two epic and challenging pieces that have large followings among players as well – so Upadhyaya’s tastes aren’t so different from us mortals after all.

Genshin4Good and Impact4Music, which stand behind the charity concert in Vienna, are part of a wider push by HoYoverse to become a more global company. 

Wenyi Jin, HoYoverse’s president of global publishing and operations, told me in an email interview that “we are just scratching the surface of what we might achieve long term.” 

Echoing something Upadhyaya said when I spoke to him, she wrote: “We are starting with smaller projects first to explore how to leverage our influence in support of good causes in an enjoyable, helpful, and sustainable way for our fans, community, and our team members.”

Wenyi Jin serves as HoYoverse's president of global publishing and operations. / HoYoverse

Impact4Music, for example, mostly consists of “small funds to cover the cost of venues, the manufacturing of souvenirs and goodies, or even promotion of the concert.” The project was borne out of fans’ desires to experience more Genshin Impact concerts in their vicinity and a rising number of requests by orchestras to cover or adapt the game’s soundtrack. “Therefore, we thought we may connect these two sides of our fanbase if we support people eager to play our music with people eager to hear it,” Jin told me.

So far, Impact4Music has supported a dozen events similar to the one in Vienna across Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the US – and any non-profit orchestra can reach out to the project via impact4good@hoyoverse.com, in case they have ideas for something they need support for.

As always with HoYoverse, we have to be careful with its definition of “smaller projects” – the Genshin Impact charity concert in Vienna even had the UN’s eyes on it and for the musicians I met after speaking to Vijay Upadhyaya, the performance on the next day would be one of the biggest appearances in their lives. The company alone knows what “bigger” might entail and it can only be something ambitious.