Background At the turn of the twentieth century London did not have permanent salaried orchestras. The main music venues:
Covent Garden, the
Philharmonic Society and the
Queen's Hall had their players engaged for the concert or season. At the time it was also an accepted practice for players to break their contracts for better-paid engagements, and then engage another player to deputise at the concert (and the rehearsals before). The treasurer of the Philharmonic Society, John Mewburn Levien, described the system thus: "
A, whom you want, signs to play at your concert. He sends
B (whom you don't mind) to the first rehearsal.
B, without your knowledge or consent, sends
C to the second rehearsal. Not being able to play at the concert,
C sends
D, whom you would have paid five
shillings to stay away." , Thomas Busby, John Solomon and Henri van der Meerschen, founding fathers of the LSO , who conducted the LSO's first concert|alt=elderly, stout, bald white man with huge beard and moustache In 1904 the manager of the Queen's Hall,
Robert Newman and the conductor of his
promenade concerts,
Henry Wood, agreed that they could no longer tolerate the deputy system. After a rehearsal in which Wood was faced with dozens of unfamiliar faces in his own orchestra, Newman came to the platform and announced: "Gentlemen, in future there will be
no deputies! Good morning!" This caused a furore. Orchestral musicians were not highly paid, and removing their chances of better-paid engagements permitted by the deputy system was a serious financial blow to many of them. While travelling by train to play under Wood at a music festival in the north of England in May 1904, soon after Newman's announcement, some of his leading players discussed the situation and agreed to try to form their own orchestra. The principal movers were three horn players (
Adolf Borsdorf, Thomas Busby, and Henri van der Meerschen) and a trumpeter, John Solomon. with a constitution that gave the organisation independence. At concerts promoted by the LSO, the members worked without fee, their remuneration coming at the end of each season in a sharing of the orchestra's profits. Borsdorf was a player of international reputation, and through his influence, the orchestra secured
Hans Richter to conduct its first concert. The programme consisted of the prelude to
Die Meistersinger, music by
Bach,
Mozart,
Elgar and
Liszt, and finally
Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. In a profile of the orchestra in 1911,
The Musical Times said:
Early years The orchestra made its first British tour in 1905, conducted by
Sir Edward Elgar. The following year the LSO played outside Britain for the first time, giving concerts in Paris, conducted by Édouard Colonne,
Sir Charles Stanford and
André Messager.
Richard Morrison, in his centenary study of the LSO, writes of "stodgy programmes of insipid Cowen, worthy Stanford, dull Parry and mediocre Mackenzie". In its early years Richter was the LSO's most frequently engaged conductor, with four or five concerts every season; the orchestra's website and Morrison's 2004 book both count him as the orchestra's first chief conductor, though the 1911
Musical Times article indicates otherwise. Richter retired from conducting in 1911, and Elgar was elected conductor-in-chief for the 1911–12 season. Elgar conducted six concerts,
Arthur Nikisch three, and
Willem Mengelberg,
Fritz Steinbach and
Gustave Doret one each. Nikisch was invited to tour North America in 1912, and despite his long association with the
Berlin Philharmonic and
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, he insisted that the LSO should be contracted for the tour. The orchestra, 100-strong (all men except for the harpist), was booked to sail on the
Titanic, but the tour schedule was changed at the last minute, and the players sailed safely on the
Baltic. The tour was arduous, but a triumph.
The New York Press said, "The great British band played with a vigor, force and temperamental impetuousness that almost lifted the listener out of his seat."
The New York Times praised all departments of the orchestra, though, like
The Manchester Guardian, it found the strings "brilliant rather than mellow". The paper had a little fun at the LSO's expense: from the viewpoint of a country that had long enjoyed permanent, salaried orchestras such as the
Boston Symphony, it gently mocked the LSO's "bold stand for the sacred right of sending substitutes"
First World War and 1920s Shortly after the beginning of the war the board of the orchestra received a petition from rank and file players protesting about Borsdorf's continued membership of the LSO. Although he had done as much as anyone to found the orchestra, had lived in Britain for 30 years and was married to an Englishwoman, Borsdorf was regarded by some colleagues as an
enemy alien and was forced out of the orchestra. , benefactor of the wartime LSO|alt=middle-aged man in three-piece suit; he has a small neat beard and moustache During the war the musical life of Britain was drastically curtailed. The LSO was helped to survive by large donations from
Sir Thomas Beecham, who also subsidised the Hallé and the Royal Philharmonic Society. For a year he took the role, though not the title, of chief conductor of the LSO. In 1916 his millionaire father died and Beecham's financial affairs became too complicated for any further musical philanthropy on his part. In 1917 the LSO's directors agreed unanimously that they would promote no more concerts until the end of the war. The orchestra played for other managements, and managed to survive, although the hitherto remunerative work for regional choral societies dwindled to almost nothing. When peace resumed many of the former players were unavailable. A third of the orchestra's pre-war members were in the armed forces, and rebuilding was urgently needed. The orchestra was willing to allow the ambitious conductor
Albert Coates to put himself forward as chief conductor. Coates had three attractions for the orchestra: he was a pupil of Nikisch, he had rich and influential contacts, and he was willing to conduct without fee. In
The Observer Newman wrote, "There have been rumours about during the week of inadequate rehearsal. Whatever the explanation, the sad fact remains that never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable an exhibition of itself." Coates remained as chief conductor for two seasons, and after the initial debacle is credited by Morrison with "breathing life and energy into the orchestra". After Coates left, the orchestra reverted to its preferred practice of engaging numerous guest conductors rather than a single principal conductor. Both the
BBC and Beecham had ambitions to bring London's orchestral standards up to those of Berlin. After an early attempt at co-operation between the BBC and Beecham, they went their separate ways. In 1929 the BBC began recruiting for the new
BBC Symphony Orchestra under
Adrian Boult. The prospect of joining a permanent, salaried orchestra was attractive enough to induce some LSO players to defect. The new orchestra immediately received enthusiastic reviews that contrasted starkly with the severe press criticisms of the LSO's playing. According to the critic
W. J. Turner the LSO's problem was not that its playing had deteriorated, but that it had failed to keep up with the considerable improvements in playing achieved over the past two decades by the best European and American orchestras.
1930s In 1931 Beecham was approached by the rising young conductor
Malcolm Sargent with a proposal to set up a permanent, salaried orchestra with a subsidy guaranteed by Sargent's patrons, the
Courtauld family. Originally Sargent and Beecham had in mind a reorganised version of the LSO, but the orchestra baulked at weeding out and replacing underperforming players. In 1932 Beecham lost patience and agreed with Sargent to set up a new orchestra from scratch. The
London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), as it was named, consisted of 106 players including a few young musicians straight from music college, many established players from provincial orchestras, and 17 of the LSO's leading members. To try to raise its own standards the LSO had engaged Mengelberg, a famous orchestral trainer, known as a perfectionist. He made it a precondition that the deputy system must be abandoned, which occurred in 1929. He conducted the orchestra for the 1930 season, and music critics commented on the improvement in the playing. Nonetheless, as patently the third-best orchestra in London, the LSO lost work it had long been used to, including the Covent Garden seasons, the Royal Philharmonic Society concerts and the Courtauld-Sargent concerts. The orchestra persuaded
Sir Hamilton Harty, the popular conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, to move from Manchester to become the LSO's principal conductor. Harty brought with him eight of the Hallé's leading players to replenish the LSO's ranks, depleted by defections to the BBC and Beecham. Critics including
Neville Cardus recognised the continued improvement in the LSO's playing: "On this evening's hearing the London Symphony Orchestra is likely, after all, to give its two rivals a gallant run. Under Sir Hamilton it will certainly take on a style of sincere expression, distinguished from the virtuoso brilliance cultivated by the B.B.C. Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Beecham." Among the milestones on the orchestra's path to recovery were the premieres of
Walton's ''
Belshazzar's Feast'' (1930) and
First Symphony (1934), showing the orchestra "capable of rising to the challenge of the most demanding contemporary scores" (Morrison). The foundation of the
Glyndebourne Festival in 1934 was another good thing for the LSO, as its players made up nearly the entirety of the festival orchestra. An important additional source of income for the orchestra was the film industry. In March 1935 the LSO recorded
Arthur Bliss's incidental music for
Alexander Korda's film
Things to Come. According to the LSO's website the recording took 14 full orchestral sessions and "started a veritable revolution in film production history. ... For the first time, music for the cinema, previously regarded as a lowly art form, captured the attention of classical music scholars and enthusiasts, music critics and the film and music public. The LSO had begun its long historic journey as the premier film orchestra." In London Harty did not prove to be a box-office draw, and according to Morrison, he was "brutally and hurtfully" dropped in 1934, as his LSO predecessor Elgar had been in 1912. After this the orchestra did not appoint a chief conductor for nearly 20 years. By 1939 the orchestra's board was planning an ambitious programme for 1940, with guests including Bruno Walter,
Leopold Stokowski,
Erich Kleiber and
George Szell.
1940s and 50s When the Second World War broke out the orchestra's plans had to be almost completely changed. During the First World War the public's appetite for concert-going diminished drastically, but from the start of the Second it was clear that there was a huge demand for live music. The LSO arranged a series of concerts conducted by Wood, with whom the orchestra was completely reconciled. When the BBC evacuated its orchestra from London and abandoned
the Proms, the LSO took over for Wood. The Carnegie Trust, with the support of the British government, contracted the LSO to tour Britain, taking live music to towns where symphony concerts were hitherto unknown. The orchestra's loss of manpower was far worse in the Second World War than in the First. Between 1914 and 1918 there were 33 members of the LSO away on active service; between 1939 and 1945 there were more than 60, of whom seven were killed. The orchestra found replacements wherever it could, including the bands of army regiments based in London, whose brass and woodwind players were unofficially recruited. During the war it had become clear that private patronage was no longer a practical means of sustaining Britain's musical life; a state body, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts – the forerunner of the
Arts Council – was established, and given a modest budget for public subsidy. The council made it a condition of sponsoring the LSO that the profit-sharing principle should be abandoned and the players made salaried employees. This renunciation of the principles for which the LSO had been founded was rejected by the players, and the offered subsidy was declined. At the end of the war the LSO had to face new competition. The
BBC Symphony Orchestra and the
London Philharmonic Orchestra had survived the war intact, the latter, abandoned by Beecham, as a self-governing body. All three were quickly overshadowed by two new orchestras:
Walter Legge's
Philharmonia and Beecham's
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. To survive, the LSO played in hundreds of concerts of popular classics under undistinguished conductors. By 1948 the orchestra was anxious to resume promoting its own concert series. The players decided to accept the Arts Council's conditions for subsidy, and changed the LSO's constitution to replace profit-sharing with salaries. With a view to raising its playing standards it engaged
Josef Krips as conductor. His commitments in Vienna preventing him from becoming the LSO's chief conductor until 1950, but from his first concert with the orchestra in December 1948 he influenced the playing for the better. With Krips and others the orchestra recorded extensively for the
Decca Record Company during the early 1950s. When the
Royal Festival Hall opened in 1951 the LSO and LPO engaged in a mutually bruising campaign for sole residency there. Neither was successful, and the Festival Hall became the main London venue for both orchestras and for the RPO and Philharmonia. Krips left the LSO in 1954, and the following year tensions between the orchestral principals and the rank-and-file players erupted into an irreconcilable dispute. The principals argued that the future of the LSO lay in profitable session work for film companies, rather than in the overcrowded field of London concerts. They also wished to be free to accept such engagements individually, absenting themselves from concerts if there were a clash of dates. The LSO's board, which reflected the majority opinion of the players, refused to accommodate the principals, most of whom resigned
en masse, to form the
Sinfonia of London, a session ensemble that flourished from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, and then faded away. For fifteen years after the split the LSO did little film work, recording only six soundtracks between 1956 and 1971, compared with more than 70 films between 1940 and 1955. The average age of the LSO players dropped to about 30. He was the LSO's first professional manager; all his predecessors as secretary/managing director had been orchestral players combining the duties with their orchestral playing. A rising conductor of a younger generation,
Georg Solti, began working with the LSO; Fleischmann persuaded the management of the
Vienna Festival to engage the LSO with Solti, Stokowski and Monteux for the 1961 Festwochen. While in Vienna, Fleischmann persuaded Monteux to accept the chief conductorship of the orchestra. Though 86 years old, Monteux asked for, and received, a 25-year contract with a 25-year option of renewal. He lived for another three years, working with the LSO to within weeks of his death. Members of the LSO believed that in those few years he had transformed the orchestra; Neville Marriner said that Monteux "made them feel like an international orchestra ... He gave them extended horizons and some of his achievements with the orchestra, both at home and abroad, gave them quite a different constitution." Announcing Monteux's appointment, Fleischmann added that the LSO would also work frequently with
Antal Doráti and the young
Colin Davis. Together with Tuckwell, chairman of the orchestra, Fleischmann worked to create the LSO Trust, a fund to finance tours and provide sick and holiday pay for LSO players, thus ending, as Morrison says, "nearly sixty years of 'no play, no pay' ... this was a revolution." They also pioneered formal sponsorship by commercial firms: the orchestra's "Peter Stuyvesant" concerts, underwritten by the tobacco company of that name, were given in London,
Guildford,
Bournemouth, Manchester and
Swansea. The company also sponsored LSO commissions of new works by British composers. In 1964 the LSO undertook its first world tour, taking in Israel, Turkey, Iran, India, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and the United States. The following year
István Kertész was appointed principal conductor. Negotiations with the Corporation of the City of London with a view to establishing the LSO as the resident orchestra of the planned
Barbican Centre began in the same year. In 1966
Leonard Bernstein conducted the LSO for the first time, in
Mahler's
Symphony of a Thousand at the
Royal Albert Hall. This was another coup for Fleischmann, who had to overcome Bernstein's scorn for the inadequate rehearsal facilities endured by London orchestras. Bernstein remained associated with the LSO for the rest of his life, and was its president from 1987 to 1990. Mindful of the enormous success of the
Philharmonia Chorus, founded in 1957 by Legge to work with his Philharmonia Orchestra, the LSO decided to establish its own chorus. The
LSO Chorus (later called the London Symphony Chorus) was formed in 1966 under
John Alldis as chorus master. There was a brief crisis, after which the professional element was removed, and the LSO chorus became, and remains, an outstanding amateur chorus. Kertész, too, was dispensed with when he sought control of all artistic matters; his contract was not renewed when it expired in 1968. His successor as principal conductor was
André Previn, who held the post for 11 years – the longest tenure of the post to date. By the Previn era the LSO was being described as the finest of the London orchestras. A reviewer of an Elgar recording by one of the other orchestras remarked, "these symphonies really deserve the LSO at its peak." The implication that the LSO was not always at its peak was illustrated when Sir Adrian Boult, who was recording Elgar and Vaughan Williams with the LSO, refused to continue when he discovered that five leading principals had absented themselves.
EMI took Boult's side, and the orchestra apologised.
1970s and 80s In 1971
John Culshaw of BBC television commissioned "André Previn's Music Night", bringing classical music to a large new audience. Previn would talk informally direct to camera and then turn and conduct the LSO, whose members were dressed in casual sweaters or shirts rather than formal evening clothes. Morrison writes, "More British people heard the LSO play in
Music Night in one week than in sixty-five years of LSO concerts." Several series of the programme were screened between 1971 and 1977. Previn's popularity with the public enabled him and the LSO to programme works that under other conductors could have been box-office disasters, such as
Messiaen's
Turangalila Symphony. In the early 1970s the LSO recorded two firsts for a British orchestra, appearing at the
Salzburg Festival, conducted by Previn,
Seiji Ozawa and
Karl Böhm, in 1973, and playing at the
Hollywood Bowl the following year. The lack of good rehearsal facilities to which Bernstein had objected was addressed in the 1970s when, jointly with the LPO, the LSO acquired and restored a disused church in
Southwark, converting it into the
Henry Wood Hall, a convenient and acoustically excellent rehearsal space and recording studio, opened in 1975. In 1978 two aspects of the LSO's non-symphonic work were recognised. The orchestra shared in three
Grammy awards for the score to
Star Wars; and the LSO "Classic Rock" recordings, in the words of the orchestra's website, became hugely popular and provided handsome royalties.
Claudio Abbado, principal guest conductor since 1971, succeeded Previn as chief conductor in the orchestra's diamond jubilee year, 1979. In a 1988 study of the LSO in
Gramophone magazine James Jolly wrote that Abbado was in many ways the antithesis of Previn in terms of style and repertoire, bringing to the orchestra a particular authority in the Austro-German classics as well as a commitment to the avant-garde. Abbado had considerable international prestige, but this too had its downside for the LSO: he frequently made his major recordings with the Boston or
Chicago Symphony Orchestras or the
Vienna Philharmonic. One of the LSO's principals commented, "Although we were sweating our guts playing those vast Mahler symphonies for ... Abbado, he would go and record them with other orchestras, which made us feel like second, maybe even third choice". In 1982 the LSO took up residence at the Barbican. In the first years of the residency, the orchestra came close to financial disaster, primarily because of over-ambitious programming and the poor ticket sales that resulted.
The Times commented that the LSO "were tempted by their own need for challenge (and a siren chorus of critics) to begin a series of more modern and adventurous music: six nights a week of
Tippett,
Berlioz,
Webern,
Stockhausen designed to draw in a new public. Instead it put an old audience to flight." The LSO's difficulties were compounded by the satirical magazine
Private Eye, which ran a series of defamatory articles about the orchestra. The articles were almost wholly untrue and the magazine was forced to pay substantial libel damages, but in the short term serious damage was done to the orchestra's reputation and morale. In 1985 the orchestra mounted "Mahler, Vienna and the Twentieth Century", planned by Abbado, followed the next year by an equally successful Bernstein festival. During 1988 the orchestra adopted an education policy which included the establishment of "LSO Discovery", offering "people of all ages, from babies through music students to adults, an opportunity to get involved in music-making". In September 1988
Michael Tilson Thomas succeeded Abbado as chief conductor. In 1989 the Royal Philharmonic Society established its Orchestra Award for "excellence in playing and playing standards"; the LSO was the first winner.
Colin Matthews was appointed as the orchestra's associate composer in 1991, and the following year Richard McNicol became LSO Discovery's first music
animateur. In 1993 the LSO again featured in a British television series, playing in
Concerto! with Tilson Thomas and
Dudley Moore. Among those appearing were
Alicia de Larrocha,
James Galway,
Steven Isserlis,
Barry Douglas,
Richard Stoltzman and
Kyoko Takezawa. The series received an
Emmy Award. In 1995, the orchestra appointed Sir Colin Davis as principal conductor. He had first conducted the LSO in 1959, and had been widely expected to succeed Monteux as principal conductor in 1964. Among the most conspicuous of Davis's projects with the orchestra was the LSO's most ambitious festival thus far, the "Berlioz Odyssey", in which all Berlioz's major works were given.
Les Troyens won two
Grammy awards.'' In 2003, with backing from the banking firm UBS, the orchestra opened
LSO St Luke's, its music education centre, in a former church near the Barbican. The following year the orchestra celebrated its centenary, with a gala concert attended by the LSO's patron,
the Queen. After serving as managing director for 21 years, Clive Gillinson left to become chief executive of
Carnegie Hall, New York. In 2005, Kathryn McDowell succeeded Gillinson as managing director. In 2010 the LSO visited Poland and Abu Dhabi for the first time and made its first return to India since the 1964 world tour. In March 2015, the LSO simultaneously announced the departure of Gergiev as principal conductor at the end of 2015, and the appointment of
Sir Simon Rattle as its music director from September 2017, with an initial contract of five years. In February 2016 the orchestra announced that beginning with the 2016–17 season
Gianandrea Noseda would be titled "Principal Guest Conductor" (joining the orchestra's other Principal Guest Conductor,
Daniel Harding, who held that post 2006-2017), and that
Michael Tilson Thomas would be titled "Conductor Laureate" and
Andre Previn would be titled "Conductor Emeritus." In January 2021 the LSO announced an extension of Rattle's contract as music director until the end of the 2023 season, after which he was given the title of Conductor Emeritus for life.
Sir Antonio Pappano first guest-conducted the LSO in 1996. In March 2021, the LSO announced his appointment as its next chief conductor, effective in September 2024. In February 2022, the orchestra announced
Barbara Hannigan as its "Associate Artist" for three years. McDowell is scheduled to stand down as managing director of the LSO in July 2026. In January 2026, the orchestra announced the appointment of John Harte as its next managing director, effective in August 2026. ==Reputation==