It has been called the king of musical instruments - but to organist and music instructor Chiu Siu-ling the pipe organ is the 'pearl' of the Hong Kong Cultural Centre.
The hand-made organ, built by famed Austrian manufacturer Rieger Orgelbau, has attracted many of the world's renowned performers to Hong Kong over the past 20 years.
To celebrate the Cultural Centre's 20th anniversary, 40 of Chiu's students will give two free organ recitals tomorrow.
Chiu has been an instructor on the Cultural Centre's 'King of the Instruments' Organ Education Series since 1999. The programme provides training in the basic theoretical and practical skills needed to play the instrument.
The organ - installed at a cost of HK$10 million when the Cultural Centre was built in 1989 - has four manuals (keyboards), 93 stops (which allow for selection of timbre) and 8,000 pipes. It is one of the largest mechanical tracker-action organs in Southeast Asia.
With large pipes extending both vertically and horizontally, the pipe organ is visually magnificent. But what made Mozart name it the 'king of the instruments' is not so much the way it looks. Rather, it is the array of timbre and volume it can produce. It is almost as rich as that of a full-size symphony orchestra despite the fact that the organist is the only person responsible for the sound. The repertoire of pipe organs is equally wide, with pieces written centuries before the piano came into existence.