South China Morning Post - Music

Speaking from Poland on a video call, Lyu Tianyao seems like any other teenager, albeit a disarmingly warm and polite one with a radiant smile. But when she performs on stage, a quiet intensity takes over. At the 2025 International Chopin Piano Competition – founded in 1927 and held every five years – the then 16-year-old was one of the youngest ever finalists, captivating audie...

By Mary Carole McCauley American jazz icon Herbie Hancock remains exactly where he always has been – at the forefront of his field, observing, innovating and asking unnerving questions of himself and everyone he encounters. At 86, Hancock has been performing music and composing it for a very, very long time. Seventy-four years to be exact, if you count the former child prodigy’s...

This is the 81st instalment in a biweekly series profiling major Hong Kong pop culture figures of recent decades. Celebrities who reach their mid-nineties have usually long since traded the spotlight for a rocking chair, but not Bowie Woo Fung, who, at 94 years old, is likely still practising his footwork. On June 7, 2026, he took the stage for his sixth concert at the Hong Kong...

Closing the season with scale and grandeur on July 3, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra launched the audience onto the high seas with a programme anchored by Ralph Vaughan Williams’ rarely performed A Sea Symphony. The sprawling work has not been aired by the orchestra since the 1980s and it is a cantata, song cycle and oratorio rolled into one, each of its four movements set...

Camille Banzon’s journey to becoming a pioneer of the underground music scene in the Philippines was defined by necessity from the outset. A decade ago, when running a hostel on the island of Siargao, she learned the basics of DJing so she could play music at the parties she hosted. By the time she was forced to relocate to Manila in 2021 after a devastating typhoon, she was alr...