August 15, 2026
Site Update: Thirteen Concerts Added, and Two Corrections We Owed You
The August 15 maintenance pass. For twenty-one hours we told readers the Joshua Bell concert was not yet on sale when it was. Thirteen concerts added, including a Rigoletto that plays tonight and that we wrote about four days ago without ever building its page.
By 小魔女·Edited by 马勒迷
We read the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture and Tourism's performance permits every day, then re-check each venue's own ticketing endpoint. Here is the August 15 pass. The thing we got wrong comes first.
We told readers a ticket was not on sale while it was being sold
Joshua Bell and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, October 17 at the Shanghai Concert Hall, went on sale at 19:00 on August 14. At 08:30 the next morning our page still read coming soon. For twenty-one hours anyone checking that concert would have concluded tickets had not been released.
The reason is not flattering. We had the on-sale moment right; it went in when the announcement was read. But whether a page says on sale is a separate field, set by whoever last touched the row, and it does not turn over on its own when the clock passes. Two fields describe the same fact and only one of them moves by itself.
The hourly on-sale re-check found it. That check exists for exactly this failure and this is the first time it has caught anything that mattered. The field now reads on sale, and the change is in the update record rather than quietly overwritten.
What should be fixed is the field, not the patrol that chases it. We have written that down.
Two concerts added from the permit feed
Three foreign-artist permits were granted on August 12, all at Jaguar Shanghai Symphony Hall.
December 13, A Confession of Truth, a Chen Pi-hsien piano recital in the chamber hall. We already list a Chen Pi-hsien recital, in the Chinese Beethoven cycle in September 2027, and it has nothing to do with this one. Nine months apart, different title, different series, two separate recitals.
October 25, Ju Percussion Group, AMPLIFIED+. We have not recorded a hall for this one. The permit says only "Shanghai Symphony Hall" without naming the room. The main hall is very likely, since the group played there in December 2025 and the chamber hall is taken that evening at 19:15 by the orchestra's own season concert. But very likely is not the same as published, and the two rooms are 1,200 seats against 400, which changes both the price and how hard the ticket is to get. The page sits under the complex until the promoter says otherwise.
Neither concert has a programme or prices yet. Nothing has been announced, and the pages say so.
Two concerts the Symphony Hall lists that we did not
These did not come from the sweep. They came from comparing all 89 of the hall's forward programmes against our calendar, one by one.
September 19, New Wave, the Shanghai Chinese Orchestra. This one deserves a sentence of its own. The conductor is Jin Yukuang, in his twenties, and every solo goes to the orchestra's own young players. One of the six pieces is a world premiere, Xuanniao: Chronicle of the Golden Crow for erhu and orchestra by Li Cangxiao and Liu Yuhui, played by Dong Shiluan. The other five run from Jia Daqun writing for Sichuan opera percussion to Liu Xing's Second Zhongruan Concerto, a cross-section of thirty years of writing for these instruments. Programme, players and all five price tiers are recorded.
October 24, Harmonic Resonance, a dialogue between sheng and accordion. All twelve pieces are recorded. The two instruments make their sound the same way, through free reeds, and share almost no repertoire; this concert sets them side by side, with Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix played by accordion and suona in the middle of it. The opening piece was composed by Tencent Music's Tianqin Lab using AI. The promoter has named no performers at all, so the performers field on our page is empty. Not unfilled, genuinely unannounced.
Both are outside promoters renting the hall. We had concluded that the orchestra's programme list carries its own season only and never rentals. These two show that was too absolute; some rentals do appear. So the list cannot be skipped, and it needs a full comparison on a regular schedule.
One permit matched a page we already had
The third permit covers Piotr Anderszewski's recital on December 2. We have carried that concert for a while, from the orchestra's season announcement, and the permit's date, hall and curtain time match it exactly. So it is not a new concert; we stored it as a source instead. Two unrelated channels agreeing on one performance is worth more than another page would have been.
Nine more from the permit backlog, and one of them plays tonight
Following up on those two missed concerts turned up something larger than a single omission. Our permit archive held 82 forward permits marked "filed, nobody has looked at this". Some had been sitting there since August 7.
Narrowed to the ten venues we track, twenty were left. Nine were concerts with no page at all. Eight matched concerts we already list. Two were a single run that was granted and then cancelled. One was a block of 32 high-definition screenings whose permit never says what is being screened, so we did not add it.
The one we owe an apology for comes first. On August 11 we published a piece about the Shanghai Grand Opera House's pre-opening stress tests, and Rigoletto in concert was in it. We wrote the article and never built the page. It plays tonight at 19:30 in the Soar Theatre, and until today you could not find it on this site.
That is not a scraper missing something. It is our own published writing failing to reach our own data, with nothing in between reconciling the two. We have written that down.
The other eight, by date. August 23, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra at the Grand Opera House, part of the same stress-test run. September 25, a Mid-Autumn concert at the Changtan Music Hall. October 1, Baroque and Tango in the Oriental Art Center's recital hall, Vivaldi's Four Seasons against Piazzolla's. November 30, December 1 and December 3, the three nights of the Discover Russia festival — Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff at the Oriental Art Center, a China–Russia chamber programme at the Shanghai Concert Hall. December 30, the Vienna Waltz Orchestra at the He Luting Concert Hall, and December 31, the Vienna Strauss Orchestra at the Shanghai Grand Theatre.
All nine carry only a date, a curtain time, a venue and a title. Neither prices nor programmes have been announced, and the pages say so rather than filling the gap with promotional copy.
One more thing worth stating plainly. Several of these carry no hall, because the permit only names the building. The Grand Opera House has three rooms of 2,000, 1,200 and 300 seats; the Grand Theatre has two of 1,800 and 550. Guessing wrong changes what a ticket costs and how hard it is to get, so we leave it empty instead.