Hong Kong Early Music Festival celebrates grand sounds of the Baroque
The October festival will feature four concerts and over 20 players, with fresh music and unusual crossovers between genres and cultures
Baroque Europe and modern-day Hong Kong are contextually and geographically worlds apart. Still, Hongkonger Karen Yeung has been promoting early Western music in the city with her biannual music festival since 2019.
As a seasoned bassoonist who plays the Renaissance dulcian – a precursor to the bassoon – and the Baroque version of the woodwind instrument, Yeung is a rarity in Hong Kong, where concert organisers are nervous about the appeal of unusual musical programmes.
“You can say it’s niche, but I think there is a lot of potential that the local audience will love,” she tells the Post ahead of the fourth edition of the Hong Kong Early Music Festival.
“Our work is not only for music lovers, but also for history lovers. If you want to learn about French Baroque music, you need to know what happened in the Louis XIV era. All that is very, very interesting.”
Yeung received classical music training from the Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts, England’s Wells Cathedral School and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she focused on Baroque music. Upon returning to Hong Kong in 2004, she established Concerto da Camera, a chamber music ensemble.
Over the years, she found little opportunity in Hong Kong to perform Baroque music, a style of Western classical music composed between 1600 and 1750 – the period of Bach, Handel and Vivaldi – and known for its grandeur and complexity.