SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA IN CONCERT / Review

 

SHANGHAI SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 

IN CONCERT

Esplanade Concert Hall

Monday (23 March 2026)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 March 2026 with the title "Shanghai Symphony Orchestra makes delicious Singapore debut".

Formed as the Shanghai Public Band in 1879, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is Asia’s oldest orchestra. Just for context, the Berlin Philharmonic was founded in 1882 while the London Symphony opened its doors in 1904. It took this SSO 147 years before it made its Singapore debut under music director Long Yu, but what a debut that was.

The concert opened with Hong Kong composer Elliot Leung’s four-movement suite from Chinese Kitchen: A Feast of Flavours (2024). Inspired by Chinese cuisine, the short pieces were not musical recipes, instead described feelings engendered when savouring the delights. The highly cinematic score suggested western tastebuds were involved, as Deep Fried River Prawns and sizzled like a Bernsteinesque scherzo, dominated by exuberant percussion.

Elliot Leung (born 1995) is one of
Hong Kong's leading young composers.

A Copland-like clarinet solo accompanied by strings and harp relived the warm and mellow sensation when Buddha Jumps Over The Wall smoothly descends the gullet into the stomach, a true gustatory experience. Vegetables In Soup with solo flute backed by saccharine strings sounded much better than its bland title suggested. The brief Deep Fried Sesame Balls was fast and comedic, over by the time one had been chomped upon and swallowed whole.

Clearly aroused by the appetisers, the orchestra provided excellent partnership to San Francisco-born pianist Serena Wang in Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in B flat minor (Op.23). Presently a student at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute, alma mater of illustrious colleagues like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang, Wang delivered good solid pianism without neither histrionics, extraneous gestures nor over-revealing outfits.

Serena Wang last performed in Singapore
in 2017 with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra
in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No.1

Photo: Leilei Cai

The famous opening chords were boldly projected. With octave fusillades and thorny cadenzas negotiated with minimum of fuss, no seemingly insurmountable difficulties fazed her. What stood out were her poetic sensibilities, which shone through in the central slow movement, enlivened by its “scherzo of fireflies” Prestissimo interlude. No prisoners were taken in the finale’s galloping Cossack dance which blazed unerringly to a brilliant close. Wang’s encore was completely different, the sublime slow Sarabande from J.S.Bach’s Partita No.1.

Sergei Rachmaninov Second Symphony in E minor (Op.27) proved to be the perfect touring work for the SSO. Fifty minutes of unbridled passion were delivered with an enviable combination of technical virtuosity and open-heartedness. Low strings distinguished in its slow introduction, which far from lagging soon evolved into a maelstrom of emotions dictating the entire symphony.

Photo: Leilei Cai

The first movement’s development section truly soared, its single-minded intensity matched by the Scherzo’s vehemence, a variation of the doomsday Dies Irae chant, and its ensuing fugato. An oasis of calm was provided by the Adagio, where an excellent clarinet solo held court with seamless lyricism.

The finale’s vertiginous tarantella rhythm flew off the blocks and never looked back. Conductor Yu’s vision of the symphony was one of full-blooded intent which eschewed sentimentality by minimising the use of string portamenti, and the performance was the stronger for it. 

Those slurring slides, in imitation of the erhu, came in the encore, Liu Tianhua’s Liang Xiao (良宵, Beautiful Evening) just for strings. Judging by the applause, SSO had delivered a beautiful evening indeed.

Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in Concert,

part of its Asia-Pacific concert tour,

was presented by the 

Singapore Symphony Orchestra.