Guo Shan, the orchestra's vice-president, said: "It's a concert of great significance. It's a concert to celebrate the 82nd birthday of China's Communist Party and a concert to show the Chinese people's confidence in winning the battle against SARS."

With a dark blue canopy and the winding magnificent Great Wall as a backdrop, the concert is due to start with China's solemn national anthem March of the Volunteers and end with the inspiring Yellow River Cantata.

The orchestra will play the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony No 3 in the first part of the concert.

Great minds think alike. Last Sunday evening, the China Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra revived its 2002-03 season with Beethoven's Symphony No 7 in A Major.

Li Xiaolu, newly appointed musical director of the National Symphony Orchestra, said of the third symphony: "It's an absolutely inspiring piece." Li will take the conductor's baton at this Saturday's concert.

The second half will feature Dvorak's Symphony No 9 in E Minor and Charles Francois Gounod's Ave Maria.

A good many talented tenors and sopranos will sing in the concert. Famed tenor Dai Yuqiang and soprano Yao Hong -- both of whom sang with the three tenors Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti at Beijing's Forbidden City Concert Hall in June 2001 -- will respectively sing the patriotic songs Motherland, My Kindly Mother and China, I Love You.

Soprano Wang Xia, who also performed at the Three Tenors Forbidden City concert, will sing The Motherland Will Never Forget, a song newly written for those who have worked on the front line of the battle against severe acute respiratory syndrome.

The organizers have invited Tong Xianfeng, husband of Wang Jing, the nurse at the Beijing People's Hospital who died of SARS last month. Also invited to attend the concert is Lin Juying, the 83-year-old retired nurse who won the 32nd Florence Nightingale Award for Excellence in Nursing in 1989.

Li said: "I feel so honoured and excited to be the conductor on the Great Wall, China's backbone." He returned from the United States to rehearse for the concert on Monday this week.

"No one signed us up to do a concert. All of us got together with a sense of responsibility and a desire from the bottom of our hearts," he said. "As an overseas Chinese, I hope the concert will prove to the world that China will never collapse."

Li will resume his contract with the National Symphony Orchestra. This had been postponed by SARS in late April.

He said that several groups of chamber musicians with the orchestra have continued to rehearse over the last two months to prepare for the coming 2003-04 season.

(China Daily June 26, 2003)