If you’ve played video games or watched competitive figure skating in the last several years, chances are you’ve heard Christopher Tin’s music. He’s the Grammy Award-winning composer behind the soundtracks for three installments of the popular Civilization video game series, and his music has been skated to at events around the world.
Tin’s music will again come before a global audience this Friday, Feb. 13, when Japanese Olympic silver medalist Yuma Kagiyama skates to Tin’s new completion of opera great Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in the men’s free skate at the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Milan, Italy.
Kagiyama’s free skate will also mark the 100th anniversary of the premiere of Puccini’s Turandot in the same city where the opera was premiered.
The final opera by one of the world’s most important opera composers, Turandot was incomplete at the time of Puccini’s death in 1924. It was first performed at Milan’s storied La Scala Opera House with an ending composed by Franco Alfano. Since then, at least five other composers, including most recently Tin, have written completions for the opera.
Turandot in Tin’s completion was first performed by the Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center Opera House in May 2025. A recording of Tin’s finale for Turandot and his Turandot concert suite was recently released, featuring soprano Christina Goerke, tenor Clay Hilley, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the English National Opera Chorus, with Tin himself conducting.
In our recent video interview, Tin talks about the out-of-the-blue commission he received from noted opera director Francesca Zambello to compose an ending for Turandot. Tin also notes how his video game music inspired that commission and how his music has become a favorite at skating meets worldwide.
And Tin talks candidly about the daunting task of composing the final moments of Turandot in a way that honors the “DNA” of the tunes that Puccini—one of the world’s great melodists—had left in sketches for the opera’s ending.
“Just in the process of listening to nothing but Puccini for the last six years, he has shaped my own thinking of melody, especially for the voice,” Tin said. “And there was no one like him. I just tried my best to fill his shoes.”
Transcript of interview:
Jennifer Hambrick: I’m speaking with Grammy Award-winning composer Christopher Tin, who is familiar to many, in particular, for his music for the popular video game series Civilization. We’re here to talk about his completion of Giacomo Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, the upcoming release of a recording of that music, and the upcoming performance of Tin’s music for Turandot when Japanese figure skater and Olympic medalist Yuma Kagiyama performs his long program to it in the 2026 Olympic Winter Games in Milan, Italy. A lot to talk about - Christopher Tin, thank you for joining me.
Christopher Tin: Thanks for having me.
Jennifer Hambrick: Pleasure. Well, we will discuss in just a bit how Yuma Kagiyama came to use your Turandot music as the music for his program, but before we do that, let’s talk, if we could, about how you came to complete Puccini’s opera Turandot.
Christopher Tin: Well, this was actually a commission from Washington National Opera. And since you mentioned my video game music earlier, it came about through that, actually, in a very unique away. The artistic director of Washington National Opera, a visionary director named Francesca Zambello, was at home making lunch in her kitchen one day when she heard some music coming from her teenage son’s bedroom. And she thought to herself, well, that sounds like an opera, but that’s nothing I’ve ever heard before. And she goes upstairs and she knocks on his door and she says, you know, “What are you listening to?” And he wasn’t listening to an opera. In fact, he was actually playing Civilization VI, and the piece that was coming through his door was “Sogno di volare,” which is a piece of mine which actually does kind of sound like an opera chorus. So, a few days later I got an email from Francesca that said, “Hi. Would you like to meet with me? I’d like to discuss whether you’d like to get into writing opera.” And I said, “Yes, of course I would love to meet with you.” This is the call that everybody—the email that everyone dreams of getting. And so, we got together and she said to me, “What do you want to write an opera about?” And I said, “Well, nobody’s actually asked me that question before, so I have no idea.” We threw ideas back and forth for a couple of months. And then finally she said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to commission a new ending to Turandot, one where the love story makes a little more sense by the end of the opera and Princess Turandot herself gets a little more agency in the telling of the story.” And I immediately jumped on that one because that was such a unique opportunity. I mean, they don’t just exactly hand out these commissions, you know? And so, that’s how I got to, basically on my first opera commission, try to fill Giacomo Puccini’s shoes, which are rather large.
Jennifer Hambrick: Right, right. So, it sounds like before this email out of the blue you had not really thought about composing an opera before.
Christopher Tin: I had actually always wanted to, and it’s on my bucket list, but it’s one of these terrifying things because it’s so all-consuming. And a lot of the composers I’ve talked to who have written opera have told me, “Boy, you’d better plan to spend nothing but the next two years doing this opera, and nothing else.” It’s an all-consuming, challenging, challenging thing. So, in a way, the fact that I only had to write an 18-minute ending to a pre-existing opera was a little bit less of a task, I should say.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, so let’s talk maybe just a little bit about that task. How in broad strokes did you approach the ending to someone else’s opera—and I will add, and as you kind of alluded to just a moment ago, an opera by one of the all-time great opera composers, so, you know, no small task here?
Christopher Tin: No small task at all, and no pressure at all, right? I’m not the first composer to have been given a commission to finish Turandot. I mean, the version that we know the best is actually written by Franco Alfano, who was one of Puccini’s contemporaries. And then over the last 20 years or so, two other composers, Hao Weiya and Luciano Berio, have also received commissions to finish Turandot. So, I’m the fourth, I suppose, composer. And Puccini left sketches behind. And a lot of them are just sort of fragments of melodies, and each of us composers have sort of treated them differently. What I have done is, I’ve taken his sketches, and whereas some of my predecessors may have just used the sketch and then dropped the idea and moved on to another idea, I’ve actually developed his ideas more, in just the way that any composer develops melodic ideas. I reiterate them, I modulate, I recapitulate them. And I took a lot of melodic material from the completed portions of the opera, too, including the well-known aria “Nessun dorma.” And finally, I wrote a number of melodies of my own. And whenever I did that, I was very sure to make sure that they sort of contained the DNA of how Puccini himself liked to write his melodies. And sometimes I would literally do things like take a fragment of a melody from the earlier portion of the opera and I’d turn it upside down, and I’d play it upside down, and that would become the basis of my theme. Or sometimes I’d invert it and play it backwards—playing in retrograde is what we call it---and that would then become the start of a new aria that sort of dramatically connected to that earlier moment in the opera.
Jennifer Hambrick: Okay, so I can only imagine how you must have felt. What an interesting challenge, but Puccini being one of the great melodists. I mean, one of the things that makes, I think, us fall in love with Puccini’s opera in particular is his tunes. He’s an incredible composer of melodies of the voice. So, there you are sort of having to pick up the threads, right?
Christopher Tin: Um-hmm. And, I mean, I will tell you, I have—just in the process of listening to nothing but Puccini for the last six years, I mean, he has shaped my own thinking of melody, especially for the voice. And there was no one like him. I mean, I bow down before him. He is the star in the night sky above me. Like, I worship at his feet. I just tried my best to fill his shoes. I mean, nobody can do that.
Jennifer Hambrick: As I mentioned near the beginning of this interview, your music for Turandot will reach a truly global audience in a few weeks, on February 13, 2026, when Japanese figure skater Yuma Kagiyama performs his long program to it in the men’s figure skating finals at the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina, Italy. And by the way, that performance will take place a century after Puccini’s Turandot was premiered and in the same city, Milan, which is a lovely coincidence. This will not be the first time your music will be heard in the rink, so to speak. So how did this particular collaboration come about?
Christopher Tin: Well, a few years ago, I noticed that a lot of figure skaters were actually skating to my music, and I started actually tweeting about it. And I got contacted by a figure skater and coach, a woman named Carolina Kostner, who said, “The reason you’re seeing so many figure skating routines to your music is because there’s a very well-known figure skating choreographer named Lori Nichol who has taken a liking to your music.” And so, Carolina connected us and we bonded very quickly. And then maybe about a year ago, I reached out to Lori, and I said, “Is there a chance that any of your skaters will actually reach the Olympics with my music?” And that’s when she said, “Well, Chris, we have this one skater, Yuma Kagiyama. He’s looking for something for his free skate, and we know that you wrote an ending to Turandot. We think that it might be a perfect vehicle for him to skate to on the hundredth anniversary of the opera’s premiere in the same city in which it was premiered, and we can imagine that ‘Nessun dorma’ might be heard at the Olympics this year. How wonderful would it be if there were a version of it that nobody had ever heard before outside of those who had been to the original Kennedy Center premiere?” And so, I let them hear that Kennedy Center performance, Yuma loved it, and so, we decided to make a recording of it so that I could release it, but also so that I could tailor a version of it specifically for Yuma’s routine.
Jennifer Hambrick: Christopher Tin, thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Christopher Tin: Thank you for having me.
