On Sunday, November 13, 2011, I conducted the first concert given by the recently-founded Shanghai International Choral League. The concert took place in the He Luting Concert Hall at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. There was a capacity crowd, (about 700 people) and they responded at the end of the performance with sustained and enthusiastic applause. There was even the occasional “bravo” or whistle.

The program was ambitious, with the single work being a complete performance of Franz Josef Haydn’s acknowledged masterpiece, The Creation. For reasons that I did not quite understand, there was no intermission, only a brief break between each of the three sections of the work. The audience was unfazed having to sit for so long and, to my knowledge, not a single complaint about the lack of an intermission was voiced. The concert lasted more than two hours, a very long time to sit and listen to one work, no matter how spectacular. This is especially true in these times of short attention spans. I would like to think that performance was that compelling.

Click here to visit the Photos page for a photo-essay on this event.