Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra located in Buffalo, New York led by Music Director JoAnn Faletta. Its primary performing venue is Kleinhans Music Hall, which is a National Historic Landmark. Each season it presents over 120 classical series, pops, rock, youth, and family concerts. During the summer months, the orchestra performs at many parks and outdoor venues across Western New York. Cameron Baird, Frederick Slee, and Samuel P. Capen founded the orchestra in 1934. Past music directors of the Philharmonic have included William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Willis Page, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas , Semyon Bychkov, and Maximiano Valdés. During Foss's tenure, the BPO was considered the world leader in performance of 20th century symphonic music. The current music director is JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra's first female music director. John Morris Russell is the Principal Pops Conductor. Other celebrated conductors who have led the orchestra include Leonard Bernstein, Igor Stravinsky, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir Neville Marriner, and Henry Mancini. Doc Severinsen was the resident pops conductor in the 1990s. Another notable BPO pops conductor was Marvin Hamlisch who is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning musical, A Chorus Line. The orchestra  has recorded extensively. Under Steinberg, the BPO released a critically acclaimed first commercial recording: Dmitri Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony. Under Falletta's directorship, the BPO's recording program has focused on American composers for the Naxos label, including Frederick Converse, Charles Tomlinson Griffes, and contemporary compositions, including the first commercial recording of John Corigliano's "Mr Tambourine Man" which received two GRAMMY Awards in 2009. The orchestra won another GRAMMY in 2021 for its recording of Richard Danielpour's "The Passion of Yeshua." She also founded a house label, Beau Fleuve, on which the orchestra has released many discs including  Built For Buffalo, featuring commissioned works, and "Carnivals and Fairy Tales," a children's album narrated by Falletta and Robby Takac of the Goo Goo Dolls. The orchestra can also be heard in the soundtrack to Woody Allen's "Manhattan". History. Creation and early years. During the late 1920s and early 30s, considerable efforts were made to foster interest in a professional orchestra for the Greater Buffalo community. By late 1934, via the efforts of Cameron Baird, Frederick Slee and Samuel Capen, a conductor of extensive European training was recruited to Buffalo in the person of Lajos Shuk, a cello  virtuoso and director of the New York Civic Symphony. Baird's and Slee's names now grace the two buildings which house the music department at the University at Buffalo, while the university's main administration building is named after Capen. Shortly thereafter, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Society was formed and a series of classics concerts and the first BPO youth concerts were presented in the 1935-36 season. Through the leadership of Society President Mrs. Edgar F. Wendt, funds were raised to maintain a viable ensemble through 1937 when support was received from the federal WPA project, which sponsored  additional players and recruited a conductor named Franco Autori from the Dallas Symphony. Over the next two seasons (despite a variety of administrative and financial growing pains) the Orchestra presented many fine symphonic performances with renowned soloists, and began performing run-out concerts to neighboring localities like Niagara Falls. Finally, by the opening of the 1939-40 season, the Society and the Greater Buffalo community were ready to provide enduring support for the expansion of both the classical and lighter 'Pops' programming by its burgeoning orchestra. The only thing missing from the equation was a fine concert hall. Kleinhans Music  Hall. Kleinhans Music Hall was opened in the fall of 1940. Constructed with funds in part bequeathed by Edward L. Kleinhans and Mary Seaton Kleinhans. The Hall has since served as the Orchestra's permanent home. Kleinhans Music Hall was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1989. The hall was designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen. While many capital improvements have been made over the years, the hall has changed little since 1940. The hall has a seating capacity of 2,400. The BPO dedication concert of Kleinhans in October 1940 allowed the orchestra to grow internally with additional players; externally  with expanded outreach and the regular appearance of major concertizing artists; a series of FM broadcasts; and a diversification of repertoire. With demands on his expanding career, Autori resigned in the spring of 1945 and closed his tenure by conducting the Buffalo premiere of Copland's Lincoln Portrait with Carl Sandburg as narrator. William Steinberg era. A major coup was achieved when Cameron Baird (the Chairman of the UB Music Department) received a recommendation from Arturo Toscanini of the NBC Symphony that its Associate Conductor, William Steinberg, would be suitable for the job. The Steinberg era of the BPO was  marked by many changes in orchestra personnel, including the beginning of an influx of European musicians who had sought new lives and careers here in the United States just after World War II. Their presence on stage served to define a distinctly European sound that began to resonate from the BPO during the late 40s and continued throughout the 50s and well beyond. The BPO's first commercial recording, the Leningrad Symphony No.7 by Shostakovich on the Musicraft label during this period. Moreover, several of the Orchestra's performances were recorded for broadcast on the NBC radio network, beginning in  1947, and currently preserved in the BPO Archive and at the Library of Congress. Krips, Foss, and Artpark. Steinberg resigned in 1952 to take over the Pittsburgh Symphony. Josef Krips, the former Music Director of the Vienna State Opera and London Symphony Orchestra was then chosen to lead the orchestra. The Krips era witnessed a major expansion in the length of the season and the number of musicians employed as well as the re-initiation of major tours in the eastern United States and Canada, including the Maritime Provinces. Krips resigned in 1961 to take over the San Francisco Symphony . Lukas Foss would proceed to direct the BPO. The Orchestra was invited to Carnegie Hall for the first of what became regular appearances there. Its first major recordings were made on the Nonesuch label featuring the music of Sibelius, Cage, Penderecki, Xenakis, Ruggles and Foss. Moreover, the BPO's first nationwide TV appearances were broadcast on PBS with Stockhousen's Momente and Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, after which followed the initiation of several major tours, including two national tours with Arthur Fiedler and his 'Pops' repertoire. Buffalo and the BPO even received feature coverage in Life Magazine. In  1970 maestro Foss shared the dias with Governor Nelson Rockefeller at the ground breaking of Artpark, the declared permanent summer home of the BPO. 1971 - Present. When Foss resigned to take on the Jerusalem Symphony in 1971, he was followed Michael Tilson Thomas. Over the next several seasons with Thomas, the Orchestra made two Columbia recordings and toured regularly, with frequent appearances in Carnegie Hall (including a gala special with Sarah Vaughan) and performances in Boston's Symphony Hall and Washington's Kennedy Center. In July 1974, Thomas also presided over the BPO dedication concert at Artpark as the Orchestra 's intended summer home. With many demands on his time, in 1978 Thomas resigned after accepting an appointment with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 1979 the podium was assigned to Julius Rudel, the former maestro of the New York City Opera. Though faced with many financial constraints, Rudel's tenure was marked with emphasis on the classical repertoire as well as gala performances with Beverly Sills and Plácido Domingo. Rudel also took the BPO on a West Coast tour and made a commemorative recording with CBS Masterworks of music for the holiday season. Rudel's departure in the spring of  1984 was followed by the appointment of Semyon Bychkov, who had been the BPO's Assistant Conductor for the previous three seasons. Bychkov announced that the BPO would make its first tour of Europe in addition to directing the BPO's 50th anniversary season and making a commemorative recording featuring Roberta Peters of the Metropolitan Opera. The 1988 European tour consisted of performances at Musikvereinsall in Vienna, as well as concerts in Geneva, Zurich, Milan, and Frankfurt and other venues in Germany and Switzerland. Bychkov resigned in 1989 to take over the Orchestre de Paris, with Chilean maestro Maximiano Valdes  replacing him. In 1998 the Buffalo Philharmonic appointed JoAnn Falletta as its new maestro. She was the first woman named as the music director of a major U.S. symphony orchestra. Under her direction, the orchestra has reinitiated a series of broadcasts on public radio, and has returned to Carnegie Hall in 2004 and 2013 as part of Spring for Music. Falletta has led the orchestra on numerous multi-city tours of Florida, at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in 2012, and in 2018 led a 5-city tour of Poland at the invitation of the Ludwig van Beethoven Easter Festival  in Warsaw. With Falletta, the BPO also has issued more than 50 new CDs, including twenty on Naxos Records and has specialized in recording lesser known European works from the late 19th and early 20th century. Soloists who have appeared with the BPO under maestro Falletta are Van Cliburn, Renée Fleming,Yo Yo Ma, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell, and André Watts to name but a few. The BPO is one of the most often played orchestras on Performance Today, the most popular classical radio program in the US; BPO concerts are therefore broadcast in over 200 cities annually. Its  CDs are frequently featured on the Sirius radio network and it has been featured three times on NPR's From the Top.