Folk fascination

3-MIN READ3-MIN

Published: 12:00am, 19 Nov 1999

It is that weekend again, the focus of the folk year, when Island School rocks, or rather sways, to the sound of guitars, drumming and gentle humour. The 16th Hong Kong Folk Festival opens tonight with a lineup of international performers including Jacqui McShee, John Renbourne, Adrian Byron Burns, Toss the Feathers, Tom Gilfellon and Show of Hands.

McShee traces her folk roots to a moment in 1960 when she and her sister found themselves caught up in a crowd of people in Trafalgar Square. 'We ended up in the Crypt at St Martins in the Fields listening to people playing guitars: there was a War on Want exhibition there, and that evening changed my life.' The following year, a newly signed up CND member, she sang a couple of songs 'with knees knocking' and it was only a matter of time before she was part of a major group called Pentangle. The group has since folded, but John Renbourne, its co-founder and 'one of the world's foremost fingerstyle guitarists', will be playing with McShee tonight.

He started the other way round: a classically trained guitarist who realised in the 1960s the folk movement was where he wanted to be. Recently he has moved from San Francisco to the Scottish countryside, where he has bought a church, and begun building a studio. He has also gone back to college, studying avant-garde music, and composed music for harp and string quartet.

Tickets for tonight (Island School) and tomorrow (Fringe Club) are $250 non members, $200 members, with day tickets $100 ($80) and $150 ($100) for Saturday and Sunday. Call 2813 1445 or buy tickets at the door.

Watery passions Stephen Thomas' latest one-man show is called Summer Collection which, the artist says cheerfully, 'makes it sound a bit like a fashion parade'. British-born Thomas, who has lived in Hong Kong for a decade, works as an illustrator and painting teacher. This is his annual pre-Christmas show of watercolours and acrylics. painted in a jetset summer that included visits to France, Australia and the Philippines, with a few moments in Hong Kong to paint skylines with crowds gathering behind him on the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront. At the Jewish Community Centre, open Sunday-Thursday, from November 23 to December 7. Call 2801 5440.

Suzuki success She got her first violin on her third birthday: by six, Kyoko Takezawa was touring North America with a team of tiny Shinichi Suzuki-method proteges from Japan. After spending seven years rote-learning with Suzuki himself, she began lessons with a Juilliard- trained teacher who wanted her to start again, since she knew nothing about music-reading, theory or technique. It was, she says, the toughest thing she ever did. Today the miniature Suzuki strings have been traded for a $15 million Strad, and Takezawa - now Juilliard-trained herself - is one of the foremost string players of her generation. She will play the Sibelius violin concerto with the Hong Kong Philharmonic this weekend in a Baltic-inspired programme that also includes Tchaikovsky's Symphony No 4 and a rare chance to hear Arvo Part's Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten. Tickets are $60-$250 call 2734 9009 or www.hkpo.com Face to face When Kashgar-born artist Yin Xin decided he wanted to portray 'Chineseness', he looked back 100 years to end of the Qing dynasty. His research was partly done in suburban Paris flea markets and libraries, which he raided for old photographs to work into a Chinese setting. The people in his paintings are a similar mix - not so much of European and Chinese, but of real and unreal, meditative and alert, of-this-world and ghostly. Last time he had a show here it sold out: this one, Beyond The Chinese Face which runs for three days next week at the China Club, will be his fifth one-man show. China Club, Bank Street, Central. November 23-25.