Have instrument, will travel

Now, having spent more than a third of his life in Shanghai, Filippov considers himself a local. In addition to being fluent in Mandarin he can speak Shanghai dialect, and has even occasionally had to act as an interpreter for a fellow player from northern China to understand instructions that the conductor was issuing in Shanghai dialect.

Filippov has played a role in improving brass music in China, playing in a brass quintet and teaching at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

However, as much as he loves Shanghai, one thing that irks him is the pace of change in the city - more often allegro than adagio.

"Things change so swiftly that sometimes you can't find your way around the place," he says.

A case in point is a sports center including tennis courts and a swimming pool in which he used to exercise. Four years ago a new concert hall opened on that very spot, and that is now the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra's home.

Another musician who has added an international hue to the orchestra is Peter Solomon, 36, from New York, who is the French horn principal. Solomon, who has been with the orchestra for six years, says the new venue, designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki with input from Yasuhisa Toyota, an acoustic engineer, has helped the orchestra deliver better dynamic range and added tone color to its playing.

The orchestra's old home, the Shanghai Concert Hall, is a beautiful 80-year-old building whose interior, when the works of the likes of Wagner and Shostakovich used to be played within its confines, needed to be modified. On such occasions the hall's shell, an acoustic device that helped control the way sound carried, would be opened to provide space for more musicians, Solomon says.

"When you opened up the shell the sound from the wind and brass in the back would go to the sides. Even if you played very loudly you couldn't hear properly in the audience. When you played the piano, even if it was soft dynamic, you had to play mezzo forte for the audience to hear. In the new hall if you play softly, the audience hears soft."