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 second programme, Beneath One Sky, follows the “Record of Music” from the Book of Rites: “All sounds originate from the human heart…Sounds respond to each other, producing variations, which form patterns and are called music.” Opening lines of communication between past and present, East and West, Chinese folk tunes filter through works for string quartet by Chen Yi and Zhou Long. The evening then offers a fresh take on an age-old tradition both Chinese and Western of instrumentalists performing their own compositions, with Loo Sze Wan presenting his Edge for solo sheng and Wan Xing playing her Traces of Qi for solo guzheng. Eastern and Western instruments freely mingle in works by Luk Wai Chun, culminating in the world premiere of his Beneath One Sky (commissioned by Tai Kwun).