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Going Out

MUSIC Gateway. Wednesday and Thursday 8pm, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, $480, $400, $300, $180, students $150, $90, Urbtix A jazz trio comprising three of the greatest players of their generation. Dave Holland, almost certainly the finest jazz bassist ever to have been born in Wolverhampton, Jack DeJohnette, unsurpassed as a drummer in any genre, and John Abercrombie, one of the most influential and respected guitarists of the post-jazz-fusion era.

This tour reunites a partnership first formed 18 years ago which by all accounts is again firing on all cylinders. The trio format is one of the most demanding in jazz but for players of this calibre it affords a freedom which the presence of one more instrument would constrict.

Expect complex, adventurous music which takes chances and makes demands on the concentration of the audience as well as on that of the players.

Chava Alberstein. Tonight 8pm, City Hall Concert Hall, $230, $200, $160, $120, students $80, $60, Urbtix Do not be put off by the person commissioned to write the blurb for this performance who compared her with Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf and Joan Baez.

Leaving aside the question of the respective merits of those singers, not one of them belongs to the same sentence as the other two. I have not heard Alberstein but am informed by a connoisseur who used to attend her performances in Israel that her renditions of Yiddish and Hebrew songs are electrifying.

I presume the Jewish community will be out in force, but there are still tickets available for a show which may well turn out to be the hidden gem of the Arts Festival.

CLASSICAL MUSIC Barbara Hendricks. Friday 8pm, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, $600, $480, $340, $160, students $170, $80, Urbtix A recital from one of the world's greatest and most versatile sopranos, accompanied by the Shanghai Broadcast Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christian Benda.

Hendricks is equally at home in the worlds of opera and jazz, but this programme is drawn from the operatic and conservatory tradition. The orchestra will perform the overtures to Mozart's Idomeneo and Cosi Fan Tutte and Hendricks will sing two arias from each before beginning Berlioz's song cycle, Les Nuits D'Ete.

Yarra Tal And Andreas Groethuysen. Saturday 8pm, Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall, $260, $220, $160, $100, students $80, $50, Urbtix A piano duo with, apparently, an almost telepathic rapport. Tal and Groethuysen will perform four demanding pieces, including an arrangement of Wagner's Meistersinger Overture for four-handed piano, Czerny's Grande Sonate Brillante in C minor, Schubert's Fantasie in F minor and Dvorak's From the Bohemian Forest.

For two musicians playing the same instrument to devote themselves so completely to an interdependent performing and recording career is rare, but when it happens and the players are talented enough the results can be spectacular.

EXHIBITIONS Picturing Hong Kong. Daily 10am to 8pm, Hong Kong Arts Centre Pao Galleries A collection of photographs taken of Hong Kong between 1855 and 1910 tracing both the development of the territory and the medium used to record it.

The quality of the images is often surprising. Some remarkably fine early photographers either lived in or visited Hong Kong during this time, and as well as familiar land and city-scapes they captured many slices of a life very different from today's.

Some constant factors do emerge, however. Those long since demolished historic buildings appear to have been erected with the same unseemly haste as their modern counterparts as the administration struggled to construct a city as modern in its day as its glass-walled high-rise successor.

CINEMA The Gold Diggers. Friday 8.45pm, Hong Kong Arts Centre Lim Por Yen Film Theatre, $50, students $30, Urbtix Not to be confused with the better-known Gold Diggers of 1933, or indeed 1935, this is a black-and-white Sally Potter film from 1983, presented as part of a season of the work of women directors, entitled Women Make Great Films! It is a well-selected programme which makes the point that while the power structures of the film industry have tended to marginalise the work of women behind the camera, there are many female auteurs who have directed landmark films.

This example stars Julie Christie, Colette Laffont and Hilary Westlake as women in search of the gold within themselves and of a more literal kind.

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