Kharkiv Philharmonic Society

The Kharkiv Philharmonic Society is a leading musical organization in Ukraine, promoting classical music, contemporary music, and Ukrainian folk music.

The leading group active in the Philharmonic is the Academic Symphony Orchestra, whose principal conductor is Yuriy Yanko. It has 100 musicians of a high professional level, many of whom are prize-winners in international and national competitions. The society also runs the Academic Choir.

The House of the Philharmonic (formerly the Opera House) is a well-known landmark and cultural centre. It has seen performances by Henryk Wieniawski, Pablo Sarasate, Mattia Battistini, Titta Ruffo, Feodor Chaliapin, Piotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin, Aram Khachaturian, Mstislav Rostropovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Krzysztof Penderecki and many other outstanding composers and musicians.

It was in this place that the celebrated photographer Alfred Fedetsky held the first cinema performance in Ukraine in 1896. The Ukrainian Broadcasting Station transmitted its first radio signal here.

The orchestra has more than one hundred years of history behind it. In October 1929 it became a leading group within Ukrainian Broadcasting Committee, and after the founding of the Kharkiv Philharmonic Society it was granted official status as a Philharmonic. The first decade of the orchestra's existence was marked by collaborations with famous conductors Kurt Sanderling and Guido Adler, Fritz Stiedry, and Eugen Szenkar (Hungary). Natan Rakhlin and David Oistrakh started their career with this orchestra.

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