"You have to listen and make decisions for yourself. The people you play with change all the time, so you have to be able to listen, respond and have control of the relationship in a split second.

"For example, when I performed with David, who played this beautiful singing melody on the cello, I had to do the same on the piano."

Wu said that being colleagues in chamber music means that you find out what the other players are like in a pressured situation, whether they are supportive colleagues, how good they are as musicians, and whether they have good rhythm. "You find that out fast," she added.

As well as directing the CMS, Finckel and Wu are co-founders of the independent record label Artist-Led, and Music@Menlo, an annual summer chamber music festival in Atherton, California. They are also artistic directors of Chamber Music Today, an annual festival in Seoul, the South Korean capital.

According to Finckel, a great piece of music is different from other artwork, such as a painting. "You put it (a painting) on the wall and you don't have to do anything about it. It won't be any less great."

But he said that for music, you have to make it happen. "It is like a living thing. Schubert died soon after writing his last piece, the String Quintet in C major, one of the finest pieces of music ever composed, as though he felt it necessary to give this thing to the world," Finckel said.

He feels his mission is to keep great music such as this going. "That's what we have to do as musicians - perform these pieces, share them and keep them alive," he said.

"The incredible thing about music is that on the day we played this Schubert quintet in Shanghai, it was possible that many other people in other parts of the world would play the same piece, keeping it alive."

Speaking about chamber music in China, Finckel said: "One of the primary missions of the CMS is to popularize chamber music around the world. We would love to come back to China more often to perform and to help people understand what chamber music really is.

"If I had a dream, maybe it would be that within one generation, say 20 or 25 years, chamber music can be something that everybody can do. Everybody - all musicians in Shanghai and throughout China - should play chamber music."

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