World in Harmony - Music without Borders
The festival comes to a close with KLASSIK underground and Hong Kong musicians, with two programmes marking the culmination of a year-long cultural exchange between a handful of Hong Kong’s most prominent traditional instrumentalists and musicians from Leipzig’s prestigious Gewandhaus Orchestra. This innovative pairing of Chinese and Western instruments and repertoire, first shaped and informed through the open spirit of Tai Kwun during a 2025 visit by Gewandhaus musicians, took further root during a reciprocal residency in Leipzig, where the Hong Kong musicians went straight to the source of the Gewandhaus’s pioneering “KLASSIK underground” series, developed in a subterranean club next door to the Gewandhaus concert hall.
The first programme, The Journey to Harmony,takes its cue from Goethe: “The harmony of the whole makes each creature what it is…Thus every creature is merely a note, a shading of great harmony that must be studied on a grand scale.” The evening’s journey navigates a new sonic landscape where Western repertory takes on fresh prospects in Chinese instrumental sonorities. Traditional tunes on the solo dizi find echoes in the solo clarinet from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, with other cross-cultural musical adventures featuring a Vivaldi Mandolin Concerto rendered on a liuqin and Brahms’s Clarinet Quartet performed on a sheng—all threaded through the contemporary sound world of Hong Kong composer Luk Wai Chun.