Hong Kong audience joins Chyi Yu in 'campus folk songs'
Taiwanese folk singer's sold-out Hong Kong concerts a throwback to the '70s, with easy-listening tunes accompanied by Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra getting a warm response
Few performers can move a full-house audience to sing and clap the way legendary Taiwanese folk singer Chyi Yu did on Friday.
She got the heartening response by performing easy-listening but popular songs from a bygone era. Her melodic tunes - which in 1970s Taiwan were coined "campus folk songs" - set the trend for a generation.
And at two sold-out concerts in Hong Kong, the 57-year-old showed just how little her audience's taste has changed over the years.
What was new were orchestral arrangements suited to her signature voice, as she partnered again with the Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra for the first time since 2009.
The concert began with an orchestral suite of six popular songs written by local composer Joseph Koo. Played without a pause, the Romantic Suite was a good prelude to warm up the orchestra as much as the audience before the diva took to the stage. Chow Hee-chiat, the orchestra's resident conductor and the suite's arranger, was meticulous in making sure all sections in the band would have a line to play in solo or tutti passages.
Unlike her last show in 2009, when she sang her most famous opus, The Olive Tree at the end, Chyi placed it at the beginning.