An On-Sale Calendar, and the Argerich Festival Opens Tomorrow at 2pm

Tomorrow at 2pm, tickets open for the chamber music festival led by Martha Argerich, Maxim Vengerov and Steven Isserlis. The concerts are on 24 and 25 October, both evenings at 7.30pm, at the Oriental Concert Hall.

The news itself is simple. The hard part is not missing it. Venues release tickets on no fixed day, one post goes out, and two hours later the good seats are gone. We had nowhere on this site that answered the question of what opens for sale next, so we built it.

The on-sale calendar

The new page is the on-sale calendar, listed in the nav as On Sale. It is ordered by release moment rather than by concert date.

That ordering exists because venues rarely release one concert at a time. At 8pm on 8 August, all 18 concerts of the Suzhou Symphony 2026-27 season go on sale in the same minute. For a listener that is one decision, so the page keeps them under a single moment and marks it as 18 concerts in this release. The batch on 15 July at 1pm held 91.

The page carries only times that have actually been announced. Where a presenter has published nothing, we leave it blank instead of guessing. Of the 288 concerts on the site, 109 currently have a confirmed release time.

How far we verified the Argerich dates

The announcement gave us the programme details and the release time. We checked two other places.

The first was the performance permit from the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism. This one carries permit number 沪文旅许[2026]4116, approved on 29 July, filed as a foreign commercial performance, with 6 registered performers across 2 shows on 24 and 25 October at 7.30pm each evening, at the Shanghai Oriental Art Center. The announcement describes three headliners joined by three further musicians. Six matches.

The second was the venue's own ticketing API. We paged through the full on-sale list, four pages and 67 records, and this festival is not in it. That is consistent with a sale that has not opened yet.

Prices are not available. Venues do not publish them before the release, so we do not either, and that field stays empty. The programme is the same story. The announcement points to two image pages we cannot transcribe, so the works list waits for the venue's detail page.

Collections now work

An apology is owed here. The collections feature has been broken since it shipped, and we only found it this week.

The symptom was that you could save a concert into a collection, reopen the menu, and see it still marked as unsaved. The data was stored correctly and the collection page showed it. Only the checkmark never lit, and the button kept reading Add to collection.

The cause was one SQL statement. The subquery that asks whether a concert already sits in a collection was meant to compare against the collection's own id. The generated statement dropped the table qualifier, two identically named columns collided, and it ended up comparing a saved-item row to its own parent field. That condition can never hold, so the answer was always no.

It now uses a join and no subquery at all. We fixed a second thing while we were in there. The button used to read its saved state only when you opened the menu, so on page load it always said Add to collection. It reads on load now.

On-sale times were eight hours off

We found this while building the calendar. The site runs on Cloudflare's edge, where the system timezone is UTC. We had been reading release times in the runtime's local time, so a 2pm release tomorrow rendered as 6am.

Release and presale times are now converted in Asia/Shanghai regardless of which machine the code runs on. Concert dates were always stored as calendar days and were never affected.

Argerich was born in 1941 and is 85 this year. Tickets open tomorrow at 2pm.