I felt like a stranger in a strange land. The AYO had just come from Europe, the birthplace of classical music. Now we were in Shanghai, a sprawling, towering, gridlocked, gleaming, sweaty, emphysematous, beautiful and enthralling place of paradoxes and contrasts. It was a city much more populous than our country. Very few people whom we encountered could speak English, but luckily some of our Chinese-speaking orchestra members helped us to feel more at home. The rest made for some great comedy, like when we were waiting in suspense to see whether we had ordered 16 dumplings or 16 orders of 6!

It’s true that China was quite a huge culture shock coming from Europe, but I realised that we might be bringing a culture shock of our own. Just as I thought that restaurant workers casually hosing down crayfish on the street next to our hotel was crazy, I realised that these people would find my instrument, the contrabassoon, equally foreign. I imagined how ridiculous I might sound through a smartphone-translation app trying to explain how this hunk of wood and metal that makes odd noises was worth ten times their average yearly wage.

Our concert in the modern Shanghai...