The Singapore Symphony proudly presents our Conductor Laureate Lan Shui, returning to the podium of the Esplanade Concert Hall for this homecoming concert. Joining him is Liao Chang Yong, widely regarded as China’s finest baritone, in Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, a symphonic song cycle of romantic heartbreak, loneliness and despair. In 1937, Arnold Schoenberg orchestrated Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 and dressed it in symphonic splendour, a brilliant score that inspired the father of American ballet George Balanchine to choreograph it for the New York City Ballet in 1966 as the Brahms–Schoenberg Quartet. This concert is dedicated to the late Dr Goh Keng Swee, founding patron of the SSO.