Tai Kwun is pleased to announce the latest incarnation of its autumn outdoor music festival, World in Harmony – Music without Borders, with six ticketed outdoor events set against the evocative ambience of Tai Kwun’s renowned Prison Yard. From 12 Nov to 5 Dec, audiences will again experience Tai Kwun’s open-air setting where cross-cultural dialogues amidst such historic architecture find a framework free from defined boundaries, unshackling music’s liberating power to mediate cultural differences and chart bold new directions for classical and folk traditions of Hong Kong, Asia and Europe.
Opening with a special programme to bid farewell to Alicja Kwade’s Waiting Pavilions (12 and 13 Nov), the festival continues with two pioneering chamber recitals curated by Hong Kong-born pianist Aristo Sham returning to Tai Kwun for the first time since winning the 2025 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (27 and 29 Nov). Following an exhilarating pan-stylistic pairing of flamenco dancer Leonor Leal with Spanish percussionist Antonio Moreno (1 and 2 Dec), the festival draws to a close with two programmes bringing together KLASSIK underground, an initiative led by the musicians of the prestigious Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, with leading Chinese music musicians from Hong Kong, the culmination of their initial 2025 collaboration at Tai Kwun (3 and 5 Dec). Before each ticketed mainstage performance, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble will offer free pre-concert events exploring Central Asian musical traditions and contemporary cultural expressions on the Laundry Steps.
“Through past programmes like Projekt Berlin in 2019 and the Prison Yard Festivals from 2022 to 2024, the high-walled rectangle of Tai Kwun’s Prison Yard has emerged as Hong Kong’s most distinctive and atmospheric outdoor music venue, inviting unconventional music programming as unique as its setting,” says Timothy Calnin, director of Tai Kwun Arts (Special Projects). “Music crosses borders effortlessly, wafting into the night sky. While the discord of global tensions dominates the relentless news cycle, this year’s festival World in Harmony is a gentle – perhaps tongue-in-cheek – reminder that sincere dialogue, open-minded exchange and authentic collaboration remain entirely possible, reinforcing our shared humanity.”
World in Harmony opens with an immersive musical experience to mark the closing of the acclaimed Polish artist Alicja Kwade’s two-year site-specific installation at Tai Kwun, Waiting Pavilions. Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary and occupying the Prison Yard since 2024, these six translucent cell-like structures made from glass bricks are flanked by chairs cast in bronze holding huge boulders. They reference both the Prison Yard’s history and the invisible barriers that persist in modern life. Taking its cue from the open boundaries of Kwade’s cells, the two-night programme, entitled Release – a musical farewell to Waiting Pavilions, marks both the closing event of Waiting Pavilions and the opening performances of World in Harmony with a free-flow journey from the Laundry Steps through the Prison Yard to F Hall Studio featuring works exploring the contrasting themes of incarceration and liberation. Under director Patrick Chiu and conductor Felix Shuen, the programme includes a male vocal ensemble performing the Prisoner’s Chorus (“O welche Lust”) from Beethoven’s opera Fidelio, paired with instrumental excerpts from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (written in a German prison camp during the Second World War) and Hong Kong composer Jason Liu’s settings of two poems from Prison Diary by Ho Chi Minh, the former Vietnamese leader who was arrested in Hong Kong and spent part of his detention in Victoria Prison.
For his return to Tai Kwun, pianist Aristo Sham was given carte blanche to curate two ground-breaking concerts bringing together diverse musicians and musical cultures into a unique artistic vision, including newly commissioned works written especially for the programme Between Worlds – Tradition and discovery in dialogue. Marking an entirely new chapter in the pianist’s development, his collaborators include the French violinist Fanny Clamagirand, Shanghai-based erhu player Yiwen Lu (winner of the Erhu category at the 10th Golden Bell Awards in 2015) and Berlin-based Bar Zemach (Principal Horn of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra) doubling on French horn and shofar, an ancient horn principally used in Jewish rituals. In addition to standard Western chamber music, the programmes include transcriptions of Jewish and Chinese pieces for piano and shofar and for piano and erhu, respectively, as well as newly commissioned works for shofar trio (shofar, erhu and piano) from Hong Kong-based composer Elliot Leung and Israeli-American composer Ofer Ben-Amots, winner of the 1994 Vienna International Competition for Composers.
With one foot in flamenco and the other in a playground of percussion, Leonor Leal (Outstanding Dancer, 2008 Spanish Dance and Flamenco Choreography Competition in Madrid) and percussionist Antonio Moreno (Best Instrumentalist, 2014 International Cante de las Minas Competition) have pushed the boundaries of their national art form in entirely new expressive worlds. Their one-act music-theatre piece Nocturno (“Night”) was first seen at the Seville Flamenco Biennial in 2018 with guitarist Alfredo Lagos (Best Guitarist, 2020 Seville Flamenco Biennial; Copa de Jerez award in 2023). Now adapted as Your Nocturno, it completes the flamenco trifecta with saxophonist Juan Jiménez in a non-narrative dialogue of sound and footwork. Ingenious expansions of tradition extend the boundaries of conventional choreography and musical form into an atmospheric rhapsody where Spain’s most expressive art form is thematically deconstructed and playfully reassembled in an imaginative outburst of music and movement.
The festival comes to a close with two distinctive concerts that see the culmination of a year-long cultural exchange pairing a handful of Hong Kong’s most prominent traditional instrumentalists with KLASSIK underground, an unconventional ensemble formed by musicians from Leipzig’s prestigious Gewandhaus Orchestra, the world’s oldest civic orchestra, whose distinguished musical leaders included Felix Mendelssohn. 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.
In two separate programmes, entitled The Journey to Harmony and Beneath One Sky, the collective forces explore the power of transformative terroir. From the world premiere of Luk Wai Chun’s Beneath One Sky (commissioned by Tai Kwun) to various Chinese folk tunes arranged for Western instruments by Chen Yi and Zhou Long to cross-cultural musical adventures where a Vivaldi Mandolin Concerto can be rendered on a liuqin and Brahms’s Clarinet Quartet performed on a sheng, these evenings summon two separate worlds uprooting musical inspiration from the soil of its origin and sprouting anew in fresh fields.
Before each ticketed event, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (HKNME) continues their cross-cultural collaborations with other musical traditions by bringing the Chilled Steppes – of Central Asia to the Laundry Steps of Tai Kwun. From the oases of Uzbekistan to the Kazakh grasslands, two free alternating programmes view traditional musical landscapes through a contemporary lens. Uzbek multi-instrumentalist Umid Eshonkhujaev and percussionist Abbos Kosimov join HKNME musicians in juxtaposing works by Uzbek composer Jakhongir Shukur with a new arrangement of Borodin’s. In the Steppes of Central Asia, while Kazakh violin virtuoso Abylay Nurlybek and traditional fiddler Satkozy Mukhtar join HKNME for a rich multimedia display of new Kazakh works and a demonstration of traditional instruments.
As we look to a new era of outdoor music at Tai Kwun, World in Harmony builds on past traditions, with the spirit of Tai Kwun and Hong Kong providing a platform for international artistic exchange and contemporary dialogues across cultures pointing the way to creative breakthroughs in the future.
Tickets for the World in Harmony – Music without Borders programmes are now available at Art-mate.net. Become a TK FAN to enjoy an exclusive 30% off Early Bird discount on regular tickets from now until 9 Nov 2026 at 12pm. After the Early Bird period, tickets will be available with discounts of up to 25% off. Don’t miss out – become a TK FAN now to enjoy this special Early Bird offer.
For more information, please refer to Tai Kwun’s website
Release – a musical farewell to Waiting Pavilions
Date & Time: 12 & 13 Nov 2026 (Thu & Fri) | 7:30pm
Venue: Prison Yard and Laundry Steps, Tai Kwun
Ticket: Free admission, registration required
Programme Details & Registration
Between Worlds – Tradition and discovery in dialogue
Performance I
Date & Time: 27 Nov 2026 (Fri) | 7pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$480
Performance II
Date & Time: 29 Nov 2026 (Sun) | 6pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$480
Your Nocturno
Date & Time:
- 1 Dec 2026 (Tue) | 7:30pm
- 2 Dec 2026 (Wed) | 7pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$280
The Journey to Harmony
Date & Time: 3 Dec 2026 (Thu) | 7pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$380
Beneath One Sky
Date & Time: 5 Dec 2026 (Sat) | 7pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: HK$380
Chilled Steppes – of Central Asia
Date & Time:
- 27 Nov 2026 (Fri) | 6pm
- 29 Nov 2026 (Sun) | 5pm
- 2, 3 & 5 Dec 2026 (Wed, Thu, Sat) | 6pm
Venue: Laundry Steps, Tai Kwun
Ticket: Free admission
World in Harmony – Music without Borders
12 Nov – 5 Dec 2026
Prison Yard and Laundry Steps, Tai Kwun
Ticketing
Tickets for the World in Harmony – Music without Borders programmes are now available at Art-mate.net.
Early Bird Discount
- Become a TK FAN to enjoy an exclusive 30% Early Bird discount upon single purchase of regular ticket from any performance using the exclusive promo code, available on a first-come-first-served basis
- Applicable period: 22 Oct (Thu) 12pm to 9 Nov 2026 (Mon) 12pm
World in Harmony – Music without Borders Package Discount
- 5% off regular tickets when purchasing 2 different performances in a single transaction
- 10% off regular tickets when purchasing 3 different performances in a single transaction
- 15% off regular tickets when purchasing 4 different performances in a single transaction
- 20% off regular tickets when purchasing 5 different performances in a single transaction
- 25% off regular tickets when purchasing 6 different performances in a single transaction
- Applicable period: from 9 Nov 2026 (Mon) 5pm
Special Ticket Offers
Patrons may enjoy the below discount schemes for each purchase where applicable, available on a first-come-first-served basis:
- 40% off regular tickets for senior citizens aged 60 or above, people with disabilities and their minder, full-time students
- Applicable period: from 9 Nov 2026 (Mon) 5pm
