City of Birmingham Symphony

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO)
Orchestra
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Former name	City of Birmingham Orchestra
Founded	1920
Concert hall	Symphony Hall, Birmingham
Music director	Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla
Website	cbso.co.uk

The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) is a British orchestra based in Birmingham, England. It is the resident orchestra at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, which has been its principal performance venue since 1991. Its administrative and rehearsal base is at the nearby CBSO Centre, where it also presents chamber concerts by members of the orchestra and guest performers.

Each year the orchestra performs more than 130 concerts to audiences totalling over 200,000 people. Another 72,000 people each year take part in its learning, participation and outreach events, and 750 local musicians are engaged in its six choirs and the CBSO Youth Orchestra.

The CBSO's current music director is Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, effective with the 2016-2017 season. The CBSO's current chief executive, appointed in 1999, is Stephen Maddock.

The earliest orchestral concerts known to have taken place in Birmingham were those organised by Barnabas Gunn at the Moor Street Theatre in 1740, and more than 20 separate orchestras are recorded as having existed in the city between that date and the foundation of what is now the CBSO in 1920. These orchestras often owed their origins to Birmingham's internationally significant tradition of choral music, that give birth to works such as Mendelsohn's Elijah and Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, and in 1834 saw the building Birmingham Town Hall, one of Europe's earliest large-scale concert halls. Birmingham's most notable early orchestra was the Birmingham Festival Orchestra, which formed as a group of 25 musicians in 1768 but by 1834 had grown into an orchestra of 147. Under Michael Costa and Hans Richter between 1849 and 1909 it included some of the leading instrumentalists of its day from across Britain and Europe, but remained an ad hoc grouping that assembled to play only at the three-yearly festivals. The town's first permanently established orchestra of locally based professional musicians was , which was founded in 1856 and held annual concert seasons between 1873 and 1897. This was eclipsed as the city's leading orchestra at the end of the 19th century by George Halford's Orchestra, which put on similar series of concerts between 1897 and 1909.