Comparing notes

No Western performing group can claim to have had a closer relationship with China than the Philadelphia Orchestra. Certainly not in the 20th century.

As the first American orchestra to perform on Chinese soil, its visit to Beijing and Shanghai in 1973 made history and, unsurprisingly, the 40th anniversary of that episode has become a cause célèbre in both China and the United States.

The entire Philadelphia Orchestra is on a concert tour that started on Friday, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, and is continuing through Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing before finishing, next weekend, at The Venetian Theatre, in Macau. Along the way, the orchestra's residency programme (now in the second of a five-year series) will see interactive exchanges with host musicians and the wider communities in the cities it visits.

"I see this residency as the beginning of 'what happens next' in the remarkable bond between the Philadelphia Orchestra and the People's Republic of China," writes Nicholas Platt, a veteran diplomat who was a staffer on US president Richard Nixon's historic 1972 trip to China, in the orchestra's press release. "[In 1973] it wasn't simply about performances. It was about creating working relationships between our peoples - and in 2013 it still is."

The current tour is the eighth the Philadelphia Orchestra has made to China - more than any other ensemble - but it has often been the context within which these visits have taken place that has been of most significance.

The Philly's second tour, in 1993, for example, was the first visit of any major group of Western artists to the mainland since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. And given the ice-breaking nature of the occasion - after almost four years of international isolation for China - the Philadelphians were greeted by the highest authority: President Jiang Zemin.

The sixth tour, in 2010, helped celebrate the launch of the Shanghai World Expo, one of the most significant moments in China's opening up to the world.