How Taiwanese pianist Chen Ruei-bin has struck a chord with Hong Kong
Chen Ruei-bin said thank you through music for city's response to tragedy in his native Taiwan
The exaggerated stage etiquette of mainland pianist Lang Lang has found an antithesis in his Taiwanese counterpart, Chen Ruei-bin.
The Tainan-born musician could be just as bombastic on the keyboard. But his diffidence in telling how Hong Kong played a role in his music-making - from here to Los Angeles, where he returns for a concert this week - was like an anticlimax to his piano forte.
"You may not know that Kaohsiung is the city where many Hong Kong people emigrated to after 1997," Chen, 47, said while in town recently. "I always hear people speak Cantonese in the subway there."
In fact, ties were so close that donations and relief supplies from Hong Kong were among the first to arrive in the southern Taiwanese city shortly after massive gas explosions last summer that killed 32 people.
To express his gratitude, Chen agreed to perform a free concert, , for a Hong Kong audience in November, only to find the city engulfed in Occupy Central, and the venue, the City Hall concert hall, right in the middle of the protests.
"It was a concert to say thank you to Hong Kong for the timely subsidies to Kaohsiung after the explosions," the soft-spoken, Austria-based pianist recalled.
The piano recital, he said, was put together on a tight schedule. Both the Leisure and Cultural Services Department and RTHK helped by allocating a venue slot on November 4 and promoting the concert on air, respectively.
