Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs the standard symphonic repertoire at full strength, from the Romantic mainstays — Elgar, Tchaikovsky, Strauss, Dvorak, Mahler — through to music written for the orchestra in its own time. Programmes run from large-scale symphonies and concertos to pops and family concerts, and the ensemble has a long record of commissioning and premiering new work.

The repertoire divides broadly into three. There is the nineteenth- and twentieth-century symphonic canon, where the full complement of strings, winds, brass and percussion is deployed as the composers intended. There is a substantial body of new music, much of it written on commission and heard here first. And there is a lighter strand of popular arrangements and family programmes, played by the same musicians with the same discipline.

The orchestra was established in 1916 as a branch of municipal government — an unusual founding arrangement for an orchestra, and the first of its kind — and became an independent institution in 1942. It has built a substantial recorded catalogue over the decades, much of it taped in its own concert hall, and it tours internationally alongside a full home season. Education has been part of the institution almost from the start, through youth concerts, school programmes and an intensive in-school instrumental scheme that has grown from a single school to thousands of pupils.

In the hall the difference from a recording is scale, and quiet. A full orchestra at weight is a physical event, but what tends to stay with an audience is the opposite end of the range — the near-silence a large body of players can hold before a phrase resolves. The Romantic repertoire, with its wide dynamic swings, is where that control tells most clearly.

It rewards listeners who want the great symphonic works played by forces large enough to do them justice, and audiences happy to hear something unfamiliar sitting alongside the familiar.