How do Hong Kong and Singapore’s arts festivals compare?

Criticism of the Hong Kong event – that its organisers are addicted to spectacle, its tickets can be too expensive, it brings in the same names again and again – come into focus when looking at the Lion City’s nimbler and leaner offering

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Dream of the Red Chamber, a co-production with San Francisco Opera House, will have its Asia premiere at Hong Kong Arts Festival next year. Photo: Xinhua

Published: 12:15pm, 21 Sep 2016Updated: 3:21pm, 22 Sep 2016

The 2017 Hong Kong Arts Festival, which will reveal its full line-up early next month, has unveiled a few choice morsels to whet appetites. There is Bright Sheng and David Henry Hwang’s Dream of the Red Chamber, a new opera commission by the festival and San Francisco Opera. New York’s Public Theatre is bringing its very timely The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, a set of three plays set around a kitchen table in American suburbia. And as always, there will be a sumptuous selection of ballet, orchestral music and traditional operas.

The Hong Kong festival is one of the world’s largest performing arts festivals. Its annual budget is around HK$110 million. A total of 1,400 artists took part in 119 performances in 2016, and 99,000 tickets, or 93 per cent of the seats, were sold. (These figures were lower than previous years but the organisers attribute the drop to normal fluctuations.)

It is a successful festival by most measures, yet there have long been complaints about the prohibitively high prices charged for the most popular shows – tickets for soprano Anna Netrebko’s concert cost between HK$380 and HK$1,680 this year – and the programmers’ relatively conservative approach that favours big, safe names.

These issues come to the fore when comparing the Hong Kong festival with the Singapore International Festival of Arts, which the South China Morning Post profiled here. Younger, smaller, and with a clear mission to educate, engage and build up a bigger audience, the Lion City event is making waves by presenting a different model for running an arts festival for a sophisticated, wealthy, Asian audience.

The Gabriels by New York’s Public Theatre.