SSO unveils new season with TwoSet Violin, Nathania Ong and seven-city China tour with Chloe Chua
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Finnish maestro Hannu Lintu’s inaugural season as music director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra balances familiar favourites with a spirit of the new.
ST PHOTO: GIN TAY
SINGAPORE – Incoming music director Hannu Lintu’s highly anticipated inaugural season with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) balances familiar favourites with a spirit of the new.
More than half of the guest artists will be performing with the SSO for the first time, and a quarter of the pieces programmed will be an SSO or Singapore premiere.
From internet sensation TwoSet Violin’s Sacrilegious Games Tour (July 2 and 3), to Singaporean West End actress Nathania Ong’s night of Broadway and Disney hits (Dec 17 and 18), to a marathon weekend featuring all 10 of Beethoven’s violin sonatas in celebration of the composer’s 200th death anniversary, the 2026/2027 season will find broad appeal with aficionados and the classical curious.
Finnish maestro Lintu’s inaugural season with the SSO, launched at Raffles Hotel Singapore on April 8, comes as SSO chief executive Kenneth Kwok announced that the orchestra hit a record $3.8 million in ticketed income, with sales of tickets reaching a new peak of nearly 85,000 tickets in the past year ending March 31. The SSO had added 12,000 tickets to its 2025/2026 season.
Singaporean teenage violin sensation Chloe Chua will tour seven Chinese cities with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
PHOTO: PETER WALLIS
Riding on the success of the SSO’s sold-out Australian debut featuring Singaporean violin sensation Chloe Chua, the orchestra teams up with the 19-year-old again for a seven-city China tour from Oct 13 to 25. Spanning Shanghai, Wuhan, Beijing, Changsha, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Xiamen, the concerts will feature Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.
Chua will play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto In E Minor, and the SSO will also tour Singaporean composer Wang Chenwei’s The Sisters’ Islands – a symphonic poem inspired by the Republic’s two southern isles.
In Wuhan and Beijing, Chua will be joined by Chinese musician He Ziyu on the viola for Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante.
Singapore-based audiences can catch the orchestra’s pre-tour concert on Oct 8 and 9 at the National University of Singapore’s University Cultural Centre.
Recalling his training at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Lintu’s programming blends standard repertoire with a range of new Singaporean commissions by Germaine Goh, Sulwyn Lok and Zechariah Goh, and other living composers such as John Adams.
Lintu says: “If you want to understand your own time, then you have to play and listen to contemporary music. I think that’s why there are many people who don’t like contemporary – they don’t want to hear the sounds of their own time, they are scared because they are living in scary times.”
The opening of his inaugural season on July 17 and 18 reads like a manifesto for his tenure, blending classical heavyweights with contemporary sounds. Mahler’s best-known Symphony No. 5 is on the programme, in addition to the world premiere of Singaporean composer Tan Chan Boon’s commissioned Apres l’Odyssee and American contemporary composer Mason Bates’ Nomad Concerto, performed with American master violinist Gil Shaham.
The choice of Mahler’s Fifth – which, for Lintu, represents the composer’s push into new musical territory and is a touchstone for many contemporary composers – is freighted with symbolic expectation. “Something new is happening here at the SSO, something new happened in Gustav Mahler’s life,” he says.
It is also the first season for head of artistic planning Christopher Cheong, who has familiarised Lintu with Singaporean compositions and bills this as a “season of discovery”.
The SSO also recently appointed violinist Andrew Beer as its concertmaster and announced Nathanael Iselin as its associate conductor.
Internet sensation TwoSet Violin will peform their Sacrilegious Games Tour on July 2 and 3 as part of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s 2026/2027 season.
PHOTO: ZAOBAO FILE
Lintu draws from his experience as the former chief conductor of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet to programme more operatic work such as Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle (July 24) and Verdi’s Requiem (April 2027). He brings his distinct musical flavour to SSO’s Mothers’ Day Concert in May 2027 with a Nordic-themed programme.
For the first time, SSO will collaborate with home-grown Indian dance company Apsaras, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2026, in a multidisciplinary work on mental well-being and digital alienation titled Agape (Aug 21 and 22). The composer is Rajkumar Bharathi and the music arranger and director is Sai Shravanam, who worked on the soundtrack recording for the 2012 Life Of Pi film.
SSO conductor laureate Lan Shui will return to conduct two concerts (Jan 29 and Jan 31, 2027), and so will outgoing music director Hans Graf (March 5 and 6, 2027). Other guest conductors include American Marin Alsop and Macau-born Lio Kuokman.
In response to The Straits Times’ queries, Mr Kwok said the SSO saw more than 14,000 SG Culture Pass redemptions, with family-friendly events being the most popular. With halls currently 88.8 per cent full, he says there are no plans to add more ticket inventory in the upcoming season, but the SSO is looking into expanding the number of family-friendly concerts to keep pace with high demand.
Lintu – whose current term will see him lead the orchestra into its 50th anniversary in 2029 – talks about the need for the orchestra to tour Europe, reserving Finland’s most famous composer Jean Sibelius for later seasons, and his belief that Singapore can be a hub for Asian contemporary music.
“It’s possible to make this orchestra, which is already a very significant Asian orchestra, actually one of the best ones.”
For a full list of programmes, go to www.sso.org.sg/whats-on. General ticket sales begin on April 20 and most programmes are eligible for the SG Culture Pass.
