residents, and the third a special performance for students. One performance was given this year by the Chamber Music Club at the University. In some ways this may be called the most highbrow of all the entertainments Hong Kong has to offer, the concert on this occasion consisting of chamber works by Mozart, Beethoven and Leclair. Several well known Chinese exponents of Western music visited the Colony during the year, and gave recitals. Some of these were held in the attractive Roof Garden lounge of the Hong Kong Hotel, which is perhaps the Colony's most suitable public room for recitals and chamber music. The British Council continued its campaigning in the cause of British music by opening a lending library of gramophone records. of British music and inaugurating a series of lunch-time concerts of recorded music. The B.B.C. Transcription Service has continued to provide Radio Hong Kong with excellent musical performances, and the Chinese Radio Service has been enhanced and extended by many broadcasts given by amateur musical societies and dramatic groups where the very wide range of Chinese talent in Hong Kong is able to get the audience it deserves.
Throughout the year there has been a steady succession of exhibitions by distinguished Chinese painters. The majority of these are held at the Hotel Cecil, and on one occasion a most successful exhibition, accompanied by a lecture on Chinese art, was given at the Club Lusitano. In the field of Western art, by far the most important event of the year was the Hong Kong Art Club's exhibition at Macau. The pictures were displayed in the gracious surroundings of the historic City Hall, the Leal Senado. This event took place at the invitation of the Governor of Macau, who opened the exhibition. Over 200 pictures were shown. Later in the year the Club's Annual Exhibition in Hong Kong was held in St. John's Cathedral Hall, with well over double the number of pictures shown at the 1948 exhibition.
The Stage Club presented six full-length plays and gave nineteen performances to the public. It also broadcast several plays, some of which were written by its members. In the performances of "Twelfth Night" and "The Importance of Being Ernest" the stage, décor and costumes were on a more ambitious scale than anything the Club has hitherto attempted. The most successful performance of the year, however, was the production of "Duet for Two Hands" by Mary Hayley Bell, a former resident of Hong Kong. their performance on this occasion, the Stage Club was generally conceded to have attained the high standard of amateur acting previously held by the pre-war Amateur Dramatic Club and the similar institution in Shanghai. In the Chinese theatre the most important event of the year took place in the autumn when the South China Motion
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