Newly appointed Principal Guest Conductor Marin Alsop, who has an over 30-year history with the Philadelphia Orchestra that includes performances in Philadelphia; Saratoga Springs, NY; Vail, CO; and at Carnegie Hall, will lead the Orchestra on their first return to China since 2019. The tour will bring concerts and residency activities to Beijing and Tianjin, as well as Chengdu and Haikou for the first time, with renowned pipa player Wu Man and acclaimed pianist Haochen Zhang as soloists. The visit—coinciding with 45 years of official U.S.-China diplomatic relations—will mark the 45th anniversary of the sister city relationship between Philadelphia and Tianjin, the first time an American orchestra has traveled to Hainan province, and the Orchestra’s 13th tour of China—the most by any American orchestra.

The November 2 concert in Beijing will feature the world premiere of a new work by Mason Bates, commissioned for the Orchestra, a setting of the Tang poem “Spring River Flowers by Moonlight.” The piece will be part of a special program featuring other settings of ancient Chinese lyrical texts written by composers from around the world, part of the iSing! Suzhou International Young Artists Festival’s Echoes of Ancient Tang Poems program, which was given its North American premiere with The Philadelphia Orchestra in celebration of Lunar New Year in 2023.

In addition, throughout the tour, the Orchestra will perform Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”), Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra, Rossini’s Overture to The Barber of Seville, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, and Zhao’s Pipa Concerto No. 2.

Read more about Marin Alsop and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s tour to China here.