Six degrees of separation from Hungarian composer Béla Bartók

Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra was, if all went to plan, performed by the Hong Kong Philharmonic last night at the Cultural Centre. The Hungarian composer was born in 1881 in a district that is now part of Serbia. He learned the piano from his mother and had begun to compose by the age of eight. After completing his studies at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music, Bartók began studying Hungarian folk music, which would later influence his compositions. He made his American debut in 1927, soloing his own Rhapsody at New York's Carnegie Hall, which had been built in 1891 by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie …

Born to a Scottish family of weavers, Carnegie would raise himself up to dominate the steel and iron industries of the United States in the late 19th century. After his retirement, he devoted himself to philanthropic causes, something with which his name is now synonymous - the Carnegie Corporation of New York is one of the benefactors of the Centre for Public Integrity, which was behind the release of the offshore-wealth-exposing Panama Papers. One of the world's most famous venues, Carnegie Hall, in 2014, played host to a concert featuring the music of Estonian composer Arvo Part. Present in the audience that May evening was Keanu Reeves …

Keanu, which roughly translates from Hawaiian to "cool breeze over the mountains", was born in Lebanon to an English mother and a Chinese-Hawaiian father. As a boy, he was always on the move and he attended four high schools in five years before dropping out to become an actor. Reeves made his name in River's Edge, a 1986 drama about a group of teens and their reaction to a murder. He has since played both dumb (Bill & Ted's adventures) and edgy, in science-fiction action trilogy The Matrix, the fight scenes of which were choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping …