About Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra

The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1893. Throughout its illustrious history the Orchestra has worked with some of the finest composers, conductors and musicians in the world including Elgar, Sibelius, Holst, Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams and Sir Thomas Beecham to name but a few. More recently the BSO has worked with eminent British composers including Sir Michael Tippett, Sir John Tavener and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.

Principal conductors since Sir Dan Godfrey, who founded the Orchestra, have included Sir Charles Groves, Constantin Silvestri, Paavo Berglund, Andrew Litton and Marin Alsop and now by the dynamic young Ukrainian, Kirill Karabits.

The BSO has toured worldwide, performing in top venues including Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center, New York; Concertgebouw, Amsterdam; Musikverein and Konzerthaus, Vienna; Rudolfinum, Prague; and Philharmonie, Berlin; as well as regular UK appearances at Royal Festival Hall, Barbican and Royal Albert Hall, London; Symphony Hall, Birmingham and Bridgwater Hall, Manchester. Other foreign tours have included trips to Finland, Hong Kong, France, Poland and Spain.

The name of the BSO is known across the world through over 300 recordings. Previous successful CDs have been nominated for Gramophone Awards and Grammys in the US. The recording of the Elgar’s Symphony No.3 remained in the top ten classical charts for the entire year. The Orchestra continues to release five or six CDs a year, recently with works by Bernstein, Bartók, Sibelius, Glass, Orff and Stanford, making it one of the most recorded orchestras in Britain today.

In addition to its recording and international touring commitments, the BSO is dedicated to providing orchestral music across the South and West of England. Each year the BSO gives upwards of 130 concerts from its home base at Lighthouse, Poole to Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Southampton, Weymouth, Exeter, Bristol, Basingstoke and Winchester. It also performs a series of outdoor classical firework spectaculars at some of the most important stately homes in the UK including Wilton House, home of the Earl of Pembroke, Broadlands, the former home of Lord Mountbatten and Osborne House, favourite residence of Queen Victoria. A continued partnership with BBC Radio 3 also gives audiences across the UK the chance to hear the BSO through numerous radio broadcasts each year.

Read our reviews

Date and venue	Title
4-Oct-2012 Colston Hall	Worlds apart: Kirill Karabits conducts Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Bristol
Good programming makes for a good concert. Chosen works must fit well together, providing enough musical contrast to keep things interesting, but they must not be so different as to jar listeners with alien soundworlds. All too often, organisers whip up concerts in which any link between pieces are entirely superficial and completely amusical. A perfect example of this was Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s season-opening concert at Bristol’s Colston Hall, conducted by the youthful Kirill Karabits. Read full review...
27-May-2012 Lighthouse	Sun, Sand and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
This past weekend offered a taste of the great British summer with temperatures soaring into the high 20s. And yet, despite the lure of an afternoon spent reclining on the sunny beaches of the South Coast, large crowds flocked to the Lighthouse in Poole to watch the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra perform in their annual Benevolent Fund Concert, led by Portuguese conductor Rui Pinheiro. Read full review...
19-Apr-2012 Colston Hall	BSO Brave Burana: The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at The Colston Hall
If ever a concert could be described as a firework, this was it. The stage was ignited with music and we waited for the best bit - that crucial, beautiful explosion of colour. As part of the Colston Hall’s International Classical Season, The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra performed the iconic choral work Carmina Burana by Carl Orff (1895-1982). Joining them on stage were the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus. Known chiefly now in Britain as the opening music for the TV programme 'The X Factor', Carmina Burana is full of impact and oomph especially when it is heard live. Read full review...
13-Sep-2011 Lighthouse	Blackford and the BSO make a bold but poignant comment on 9/11
For its centenary concert – given on 11th September 2011, in Cheltenham, and at Poole Lighthouse on Tuesday 13th September – Bournemouth Symphony Chorus paid tribute to those who fell victim to the catastrophic act of terrorism that shook the world ten years before. Read full review...

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