Sydney Symphony Orchestra
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| Former name | National Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1932 |
| Concert hall | Sydney Opera House |
| Principal conductor | David Robertson |
| Website | sydneysymphony |
The Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is an Australian symphony orchestra that was initially formed in 1908. Since its opening in 1973, the Sydney Opera House has been its home concert hall. The orchestra's chief conductor is David Robertson who succeeded Vladimir Ashkenazy at the beginning of 2014.
The Sydney Symphony performs around 150 concerts a year to a combined annual audience of more than 350,000. The regular subscription concert series are mostly performed at the Sydney Opera House, but other venues around Sydney are used as well, including the City Recital Hall at Angel Place and the Sydney Town Hall. The Town Hall was the home of the orchestra until the opening of the Opera House in 1973. Since then, most concerts have been taking place in the Opera House's Concert Hall (capacity: 2,679 seats). A major annual event for the orchestra is Symphony in the Domain, a free evening outdoor picnic concert held in the summer month of January in the large city park known as The Domain. This event draws audiences of over 80,000 and is a long-established part of the Sydney summer cultural calendar.
The first concert by a group calling themselves the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was held on 30 September 1905. Sponsored by the Musicians Union, this group was formed from musicians who had come together to form an orchestra to accompany the pianist, Ignacy Jan Paderewski's Sydney concerts when he toured Australia in 1904. A more sustained effort to establish an orchestra began in 1908 when an alliance between musicians, their union and leading business and legal figures organised regular subscription concerts. Between 1908 and 1917, a total of 47 concerts was held by a group calling themselves the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. These concerts included many Sydney premiers of key works of the classical repertoire including Schumann’s Symphony No. 1 in B flat (1841), Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor (1862-76); and in 1910, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830) as well as a number of quite recent, even modernist works including, in 1910, Richard Strauss’s tone-poem Don Juan (1888-9); in 1911, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (1891-4); in 1912, Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1898-9); in 1913, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade (1888); in 1914, Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia (1880); and in 1917, Borodin’s Symphony in B minor (1869-76) and Glazunov’s, Symphony in C Minor (1896). This initiative folded when most of the orchestra's members were recruited by the NSW State Conservatorium's orchestra, then conducted by its founding director, Henri Verbrugghen.
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