PRISON YARD FESTIVAL: MUSIC FROM WITHIN RETURNS TO TAI KWUN, LIBERATING HEARTS AND MINDS THROUGH MUSIC
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong
Tai Kwun hosts West-Eastern Divan Ensemble alongside several of Hong Kong’s finest classical musicians to bring audiences eight powerful programmes, most of which take place in the open air in Hong Kong’s idyllic autumn weather.
After the success of last year’s festival, Tai Kwun is bringing Prison Yard Festival: Music from within back for its second year. Spanning November 20th to November 30th 2023, for 10 days, Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard will be transformed into a performance space, where music wafts above the imposing background of the granite-textured prison structure. Guests can immersive themselves in the tranquil and intimate atmosphere, as music melts in and out of walls that were built to imprison, reimagined as eager spectators to free expression. Music lovers are invited to be moved by the liberating power of performance, as it engages humanity’s primal response to music as its passport, and the act of communal music-making as a form of intuitive diplomacy.
Prison Yard Festival: Music from within brings together like-minded musicians, talented instrumentalists, composers, performers, and audiences to create and share music in and around the walls of the former prison. 8 wide-ranging programmes will be presented, including the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble debut performance in Hong Kong, the principal players of which originate from an orchestra formed with a profound commitment to peace in the Middle East.
Emanating from deep in Tai Kwun, Music from within commences inside the JC Cube with a chance to gain insight into the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble’s approach to music-making from the Arab and Israeli musicians of the group, in conversation with Dr Joanna Lee. The ensemble's approach is heavily intertwined with their mission to break once-thought insurmountable boundaries by rehearsing, performing, collaborating and touring together, playing side-by-side in the shared pursuit of a musical ideal. The ensemble’s founding philosophy – a call for a peaceful solution in the Middle East, and the conversation followed by two concerts on the Prison Yard stage exemplify the musicians’ shared commitment to peace and reconciliation.
Hong Kong-born pianist Chiyan Wong, fresh from his performance at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the premiere of his new feature-length concert film Encore!, gives the piano recital format a distinctly personal twist in a perfect reflection of an artist driven by insatiable curiosity and an appetite challenging conventions. Revisiting a Mozart piano concerto from the perspective of the celebrity composer-as-performer, Chiyan riffs with the string players of the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble in Mozart and leads us into the superhuman virtuosity of Paganini and Liszt. And by broadening the musical spectrum from the French baroque to the jazz-inflected 1920s, Chiyan highlights one of music’s most enduring sources – dance, whether it’s a courtly gavotte from Versailles or a Charleston from a smoke-filled cabaret in Berlin.
On the night of the November full moon, Hong Kong pianist Shelley Ng presents her own, highly personal response to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and throughout the Festival, 100 metronome on the Laundry Steps remind us why, even on the 100th anniversary of his birth, the music of György Ligeti remains truly avant-garde.
Over the weekend, the Prison Yard stage is given to a talented group of Hong Kong’s next generation classical musicians. Under the mentorship of some of Hong Kong’s finest musicians and visiting guest artists, they will curate their own daytime concerts from the repertoire which they have been working on.
West to east meanderings closes this year’s Prison Yard Festival with an uplifting musical trek. The music of JS Bach is the Magnetic North that fixes the compass of every classical musician, and violinist Wang Liang firmly establishes this point of departure before inviting his Hong Kong Philharmonic colleagues to ruminate with Brahms at his most elegiac and then follow Bartok’s footsteps in folk dances across Transylvania, Romania and Turkey, glimpsing the Arab world and culminating in the raucous celebration of a Jewish wedding.
Each evening concert in the Prison Yard will be preceded by short “pre-concert” performance on the Laundry Steps, each of which includes a performance of the notorious Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, in a centenary salute to the birth of avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti.
Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard Festival: Music from within runs from 20 November to 30 November 2023; tickets for the programmes are available at URBTIX and art-mate.net. Please visit the Tai Kwun website for the programme details.
Learn more: https://www.taikwun.hk/en/programme/detail/prison-yard-festival-music-from-within/1281