Founded in 1879 as the Shanghai Public Band, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra has operated under a number of different names as well as under conductors from around Europe.
Today, it stands as Asia’s oldest orchestra and has recently moved into a new Concert Hall, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, along with four Rupert Neve Designs 5088 analogue mixing consoles.
Renamed the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in 1956, the move represents an important step toward becoming one of the top orchestras in the world. The SSO Concert Hall opened to the public in 2014, bringing a new operational model to the orchestra. The building occupies more than 65,000-sq-ft over four storeys in the historic French Concession neighbourhood of Shanghai. Two thirds of the building is underground, and the concert hall rests on giant steel springs, making it China’s first ‘floating building’.
The recording studios and postproduction rooms were designed by SIWEI Music Engineering Design Group. The concert hall’s design was approved by renowned acoustic designer Yasuhisa Toyota, known for the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. ‘We were not constructing a common building, but making a great musical instrument,’ he says. ‘Every seat is a golden seat.’
Just as no expense was spared in the building’s construction, the equipment to be used for the performances and recording is world-class. The first of the four Rupert Neve Designs 5088 mixers is a 16-channel desk loaded with Portico 5032 mic preamplifier/EQs and 5015 mic preamplifier/compressors assigned to 1,200-seat main concert hall. The studio adjacent to the 400-seat chamber hall houses a second 16-channel 5088, and two additional mix rooms contain 16-channel and 48-channel 5088s for postproduction and proprietary Iosono 3D holographic surround mixing. The main recording system is a Pro Tools HDX set-up with Apogee Symphone converters. Each of the studios also use Rupert Neve Designs’ Portico II Master Buss Processors for compression and equalisation.
The studios and performance halls are stocked with microphones from sE Electronics, Neumann, DPA Microphones and Schoeps. There is also outboard equipment from Iosono 3D, Drawmer, TC Electronic and others, with ATC GL68HR monitoring.
‘We are so happy – the sound is gorgeous,’ reports the SSO’s Director, Long Yu.
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