on a number of new positions and professorships as the city continued to open up beyond the Mao years. The years before 1976 were not entirely inactive for Cao, however. In many respects, the classical music scene in Shanghai should remembered for its liveliness in the late Mao years, with pioneer conductors including Huang Yijun, Chen Chuanxi and Wang Yongji coming to the peaks of their respective careers. In 1962, Cao Peng collaborated with the Shanghai Opera House to give a performance of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, followed by later collaborations for performances of Manuel Da Falla's The Three-Cornered Hat and Delibes' Coppélia. In the shifting Shanghai of 1975, Cao was able to take his orchestra on an international tour, visiting and performing in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Professorships and charitable work, 1980s to present A number of professorships were made available to Cao during the 1980s, including an appointment as professor in residence at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. At the same time as he was beginning the turn to teaching, and passing along the invaluable experiences of Moscow and beyond to the younger generation, so was he increasingly involved in a classical music scene in transition. Cao gave a countless number of performances in the 1980s, which took him not only further abroad, but to places unvisited within China, where he was able to cultivate and promote people's awareness of classical music. In 1986, a year when he was recognised by his adopted city Shanghai for his achievements with the city award for "Achievements in the Culture and Arts", Cao also accepted an invitation to conduct over 30 performances of classical music in southern China's Fujian province. Similar success followed in the 1990s, when Cao, now in his sixties, took on responsibilities for the burgeoning orchestral music scene in Shanghai, conducting the Shanghai People's Orchestra () from 1992, later also the orchestra of the Nanyang Middle School. In 1993, at the age of 68, Cao was employed by the Hong Kong record label HNH to record a 50-CD anthology of modern Chinese classical music. Cao was also an early pioneer in the relaxing of tensions and building of cross-straits ties in the 1990s, heading the first classical music delegation to perform in Kaohsiung and other places throughout Taiwan in 1995, where he, incidentally, conducted publicly for the first time his daughter, the