SSO hall | Chen Pi-hsien's 13 December recital went on sale today, with Bartók between two Schuberts

Chen Pi-hsien's recital of 13 December went on sale at 14:00 today. Chamber hall of the Shanghai Symphony Hall, 19:15, ¥100/180/280/380/480, four tickets per account.

Bartók between two Schuberts

The first half is Schubert's Ninth Sonata in B major, D 575, written in 1817 by a twenty-year-old, followed by Bartók's 14 Bagatelles of 1908. After the interval there is one work: D 960, finished in September 1828, two months before Schubert died.

The Bartók is not an interlude. The first bagatelle gives each hand its own key signature — four sharps against four flats — and that is where he parts company with functional harmony. Set between the two sonatas it breaks the evening's tonality and lets it re-form: D 575 is Schubert still trying sonata form on, D 960 is the last time he wrote one.

The player

Born in Taipei in 1950, Chen went to Cologne to study at nine. She took first prize at the ARD International Competition in Munich in 1972 and was a laureate of the Queen Elisabeth the same year, then won the international Schoenberg competition in Rotterdam and the international Bach competition in Washington. She became the youngest piano professor at the Cologne Hochschule in 1983 and moved to Freiburg in 2004.

She premiered Haas's Limited Approximation at Donaueschingen in 2010 and has worked with Cage, Carter, Boulez and Stockhausen. The ground she stands on is Bach and Schoenberg; a whole evening framed by Schubert is another side of her.

The concert is a private hire of the hall and is not part of the orchestra's season. She returns in September 2027 in the Chinese Beethoven cycle, which is a separate matter.

One more in the same building, three hours earlier

The harp-and-guzheng recital of 5 November opened at 11:00 this morning in the main hall, ¥80–380. Yesterday we wrote that all three hall-rental concerts were on sale; this one was not yet, and that sentence was wrong when we published it. All three are on sale now.

A correction: the season's on-sale dates

When the SSO announced its 2026-27 season it gave one on-sale time — 15 July, 13:00 — and we printed that line on every concert in the season. The orchestra in fact released them in waves: 10, 15, 17 and 24 July, and more since. We have now checked every one against the ticketing system and corrected 21 of them.

The ones that have not opened matter more. Twenty-six concerts in the season still have no sale configured in the SSO's system at all. Seven of them — Emmanuel Pahud's flute recital, the first Chinese Beethoven recital, the first three Music Map lectures, the fifth Rush Hour concert and the Coco & the Danish Nuts jazz trio — carried “on sale 15 July” on our pages, which told readers the tickets should already be buyable. That claim has been withdrawn; those pages now say the sale has not opened.

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