Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
Enhancing lives through music
"Not a hair of a note was out of place; this was a performance by a world-class orchestra" The Times
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1893 and throughout its illustrious history it has worked with some of the finest composers, conductors and musicians in the world including Elgar, Bartók, Sibelius, Holst, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams and Sir Thomas Beecham. More recently the BSO has worked with eminent British composers Sir Michael Tippett, Sir John Tavener and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. This season the Orchestra will be working with James MacMillan who will be conducting his own works as part of the BSO’s “Living Tradition” series of concerts.
Kirill Karabits is now Principal Conductor of the BSO. Together he and the Orchestra have received rave reviews in the press and have just released their first own label CD. Kirill continues the fine tradition of esteemed past Principal Conductors, since founder Sir Dan Godfrey, who have included Sir Charles Groves, Constantin Silvestri, Rudolf Schwarz, Paavo Berglund, Andrew Litton, Yakov Kreizberg and Marin Alsop.
The BSO is dedicated to providing orchestral music across the South and West of England and each year gives upwards of 130 concerts from its home base at Lighthouse, Poole to Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Southampton, Weymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Basingstoke and Winchester. However the Orchestra also performs the length and breadth of the UK, regularly appearing at venues across the country including Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester and its debut at The Sage Gateshead in April 2011, and at various Festivals such as Lichfield, Henley and Cheltenham. The BSO has also performed in numerous London venues including St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Opera House, and the Barbican plus regular performances at the BBC Proms held at the Royal Albert Hall. The BSO tours worldwide, performing in venues including Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center, New York; Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; Musikverein and Konzerthaus, Vienna; Rudolfinum, Prague; and Philharmonie, Berlin. Recent tours have also included visits to Spain, France, Belgium and Hong Kong.
BSO ensembles take music into the community, performing at smaller and more unusual venues, whilst the BSO’s contemporary music ensemble Kokoro is at the forefront of commissioning and performing works by living composers. BSO musicians also take part in an extensive array of education and community projects, from national curriculum based workshops in schools, through to tea dances for the elderly and song writing projects for homeless young people. Annually the BSO reaches more than 125,000 children and adults through such projects.
The BSO has been making recordings and broadcasts since the 1920s, and now has over 300 titles to its name. The Orchestra continues to release five or six Naxos CDs every year making it one of the most recorded orchestras in Britain today. Recent releases of Bernstein, Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Glass, Bartók, Weill and Bach/Stokowski have all received rave reviews. Previous acclaimed CDs have been nominated for Gramophone Awards and Grammys in the US and the recording of Elgar’s Symphony No.3 remained in the top ten classical charts for the entire year. A new exciting project is the launch of a new partnership with Onyx Records which will see the BSO produce its own label recordings in a series of CDs with Kirill Karabits. The first, a disc of Khachaturian’s ballet music from Gayane and Spartacus has just been released. Radio broadcasts enable the BSO to continually reach new and wider audiences; a continuing partnership with BBC Radio 3 ensures regular UK broadcasts of live BSO concerts and this together with countless plays on Classic FM allows over thirteen million people to enjoy the BSO’s performances each year.
Download a pdf poster of the instruments of a symphony orchestra.
