Tai Kwun’s “Prison Yard Festival” Returns For Its Third Season

The Australian Chamber Orchestra headlines a series of concerts, including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings, where musicians reflect pivotal cultural exchanges from the past in dynamic collaborations of the present.

Following the success of last year’s appearance by the West-Eastern Divan Ensemble, Tai Kwun announces the third incarnation of its Prison Yard Festival with a residency by the Sydney-based Australian Chamber Orchestra, once again transforming Tai Kwun’s iconic Prison Yard into an outdoor performance space where music wafts from the souls of performers to the walls of their surroundings into the late-autumn air, inviting audiences to engage freely in music’s liberating power as a source of multinational diplomacy to mediate cultural differences and emphasise their confluence.

From 5 to 15 December, Prison Yard Festival offers six ticketed programmes on the Prison Yard stage, each preceded by a free performance on the Laundry Steps. Taking their cue from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a visionary string ensemble of Australian and international musicians led by Australian violinist Richard Tognetti, various performers place historic and present repertory in stark juxtapositions, with active partnerships reflecting both core and modern European traditions interacting with a wide range of Asian cultures.

The centrepiece of the ACO’s Tai Kwun residency features Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (a timeless memorial of the Venetian Republic) interspersed with the music of Egyptian-born, Sydney-based oud virtuoso Joseph Tawadros, evoking the days when the last stop on the fabled Silk Road put Western Europe at a crossroad with the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Echoes of similar rhythms, melodies and playing techniques between the Arabic musical tradition and the Italian Baroque recall a Golden Age of Venice as an unrivalled international marketplace where both goods and ideas from Asia, the Middle East and North Africa freely intermingled with the best that Europe had to offer.

Tucked between their “Ottoman Four Seasons” performances (5 and 8 December), the ACO on 7 December offers Tchaikovsky’s tuneful Serenade for Strings, prefaced by a pair of shorter modernist folk stylings from Eastern Europe: Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa, a minimalist tone poem inspired by the frenzied folk fiddling of Poland’s mountainous Podhale region, and Pavel Haas’s String Quartet No.2, “From the Monkey Mountains” (arranged for string ensemble by Tognetti), which spikes its melancholic Moravian melodies with a strong dose of jazz.

Fresh from an intensive week of full immersion in the musical milieu of the ACO’s spectacular home floating on Sydney Harbour, the Hong Kong-based Cong Quartet (winners of the 2022 Adolfo Betti Award at the Virtuoso & Belcanto Chamber Music Competition in Tuscany) once again tend their local roots in universal soil. Their concert on 8 December opens with the Hong Kong-born, Philadelphia-based composer Adrian Wong’s Childhood Sweet, a quasi-impressionistic sampling of Hong Kong desserts, from durian to herbal jelly and tofu pudding (adapted from its original solo piano version by the Cong). The programme culminates in Schubert’s String Quintet, with ACO Principal Cellist Timo-Veikko Valve joining the quartet to plumb both the joy and anxiety in Schubert’s final musical thoughts.

The Festival strives to build up a tradition by engaging musicians to re-interpret a continuous concept every year. It welcomes the return of the chamber ensemble led by Hong Kong Philharmonic’s Second Associate Concertmaster Wang Liang. Together with seven other leading musicians, they will offer the thrillingly virtuosic Octet by Romanian composer George Enescu. A national hero at home, Enescu influenced the greater musical world not only through his highly distinctive, gypsy-inflected compositions but also by teaching several generations of violinists who dominated the world stage for much of the 20th Century, including Yehudi Menuhin, Nathan Milstein and Christian Ferras. In his Octet, each musician becomes a virtuoso soloist at key moments in the piece’s seamless 40 minutes before returning to a blended, unified ensemble. Another feature of the Octet is Enescu’s profound devotion to the music of J.S. Bach, expressed through a furious and challenging fugue in which all eight parts are equal. As in the last two Prison Yard Festival’s, Wang Liang includes the music of J.S. Bach at the heart of this concert alongside music by a diverse range of Bach-obsessed composers of the 20th Century – Shostakovich, Ysaÿe and Piazzolla.

On 15 December, Hong Kong-born pianist Aristo Sham offers arguably the best way to celebrate the last full moon before the Winter Solstice with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Sham opens his programme with Beethoven’s less-famous companion piece, his Piano Sonata No.13 (both works subtitled “Quasi una fantasia”) before offering more glimpses of the moon through “night” pieces by Chopin, Ireland and Ravel, as well as more clear-cut musical storytelling in a 150-year span of Ballades, from Chopin to Brahms to Kaija Saariaho’s dreamy, multi-layered miniature from 2005.

Following their centennial tribute to Hungarian composer György Ligeti in last November’s participatory pre-concert experiences with a hundred metronomes, the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble continues in the spirit of the ACO’s “Ottoman Four Seasons” by joining forces with the Padmabhushan Ustad Mushtaq Husain Khan Association, Hong Kong’s premier Indian arts organisation, in a series of half-hour free performances at Tai Kwun’s Laundry Steps before each ticketed festival concert. Three of these performances feature Hong Kong-based traditional Hindustani vocalists: father-and-son vocalists Ghulam Siraj Niazi and Mehde Hasan Niazi as well as Najmi Khan, all esteemed practitioners of Rampur–Sahaswan Gharana, a Hindustani vocal style tracing its lineage back 400 years to the reign of the Mogul emperor Akbar. Three additional concerts will pair the accomplished Bollywood musician Shehzad Khan with Indian instrumentalists and members of the HKNME to create a singular fusion of Indian, Chinese and Western classical traditions.

The Prison Yard Festival is made possible through the continuous funding and support from The Hong Kong Jockey Club. The participation of ACO is supported by the National Foundation for Australia-China.

Australian Chamber Orchestra – The Ottoman Four Seasons │ 05,08.12.2024
Performed by Australian Chamber Orchestra

Programme I │ 05.12.2024
Date & Time: 5 December 2024 (Thursday), 7pm – 9pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: $480
Programme II │ 08.12.2024
Date & Time: 8 December 2024 (Sunday), 6pm – 8pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: $480


Australian Chamber Orchestra – Tchaikovsky’s Serenade│ 07.12.2024
Performed by Australian Chamber Orchestra

Date & Time: 7 December 2024 (Saturday), 6pm – 8pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: $480


Cong’s Schubert Quintet│ 08.12.2024 Performed by Cong Quartet and Timo-Veikko
Valve

Date & Time: 8 December 2024 (Sunday), 2pm – 3:10pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: $280


Beethoven by Moonlight – Stories of the Night │ 15.12.2024
Performed by Aristo Sham

Date & Time: 15 December 2024 (Sunday), 6pm – 8pm
Venue: Prison Yard, Tai Kwun
Ticket: $280


FUSE-IN by HKNME & PUMHKA │ 05,07- 09,15.12.2024
Date & Time: 5 December 2024 (Thursday), 6pm – 6:30pm
7 December 2024 (Saturday), 5pm – 5:30pm 8 December 2024 (Sunday), 1pm – 1:30pm & 5pm – 5:30pm
9 December 2024 (Monday), 6pm – 6:30pm 7 December 2024 (Sunday), 5pm – 5:30pm Venue: Laundry Steps, Tai Kwun
Ticket: Free of charge