The BBC Symphony Orchestra (BBC SO) is a British orchestra based in London. Founded in 1930, it was the first permanent salaried orchestra in London, and is the only one of the city's five major symphony orchestras not to be self-governing. The BBC SO is the principal broadcast orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
The orchestra was originally conceived in 1928 as a joint enterprise by the BBC and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, but the latter withdrew the next year and the task of assembling and training the orchestra fell to the BBC's director of music, Adrian Boult. Among its guest conductors in its first years was Arturo Toscanini, who judged it the finest orchestra he had ever conducted. During and after the Second World War, Boult strove to maintain standards, but the senior management of the post-war BBC did not allocate the orchestra the resources to meet competition from new and well-funded rivals.
After Boult's retirement from the BBC in 1950, the orchestra went through a fallow period. Boult's successor, Sir Malcolm Sargent, was popular with the public but had poor rapport with his players, and orchestral morale dropped. Sargent's successor, Rudolf Schwarz, made relatively little impact, and although the BBC appointed high-profile chief conductors in the 1960s and 1970s – Antal Doráti, Colin Davis, Pierre Boulez and Gennady Rozhdestvensky – the BBC SO remained underfunded. However, because it was the sole symphony orchestra in London that offered its players full-time contracts, players of high repute, including Alan Civil (horn) and John Wilbraham (trumpet), enrolled as regular members.
As a result of initiatives begun in the 1960s by the BBC controller of music William Glock, performing standards rose appreciably. Under Andrew Davis in the 1990s and Jiří Bělohlávek in the 2000s, the orchestra prospered. By the second decade of the 21st century, the BBC SO was regarded by critics as of first-class status. From the outset, the orchestra has been known for pioneering new music, and it continues to do so, at the Proms, in concerts at the Barbican Centre, and in studio concerts from its base at BBC Maida Vale studios.
History
Background
thumb|right|300px|The BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in October 2012
Almost from its beginning in November 1922, the BBC had started broadcasting from its "2LO" transmitter with its own musical ensembles. The first such groups were the "2LO Dance Band", the "2LO Military Band", the "2LO Light Orchestra", and the "2LO Octette", all of which began broadcasting in 1923. No concert promoter would co-operate with the BBC, regarding it as a dangerous competitor, but the British National Opera Company allowed broadcasts of its performances from the Royal Opera House. John Reith, the general manager of the BBC, invited the opera company's musical director, Percy Pitt, to become the BBC's part-time musical adviser from May 1923. Later in the same year, Pitt conducted the BBC's first broadcast symphony concert, which included Dvořák's New World Symphony and works by Saint-Saëns, Elgar and Weber.
thumb|left|[[Percy Pitt, the BBC's first director of music]]
Pitt expanded the regular eight-piece studio ensemble to form The Wireless Orchestra of 18 players, augmented to 37 for important broadcasts. There was no thought at this stage that the BBC would maintain a full-scale symphonic orchestra of up to 100 players. With Reith's approval, Pitt engaged various orchestras for a BBC concert series in 1924 at the Methodist Central Hall Westminster.
In 1924, the Wireless Orchestra, by then comprising 22 players, was contracted for six concerts a week. The following year, Pitt, by now working full-time for the BBC, as its director of music, augmented the ensemble to form the "Wireless Symphony Orchestra" for a new series of concerts broadcast from Covent Garden, conducted by Bruno Walter, Ernest Ansermet and Pierre Monteux; at this time Reith also allowed Pitt and the Wireless Symphony Orchestra to contract with the Columbia Graphophone Company to make a substantial series of electrically recorded discs, most of which were recorded in the Methodist Central Hall Westminster which the BBC had previously used for concerts. In 1927 the BBC and Covent Garden collaborated in a series of public concerts with an orchestra of 150 players under conductors including Richard Strauss and Siegfried Wagner. Although the orchestra was large, it was not good. The BBC attempted to stop its contracted players sending deputies to rehearsals and even to concerts, but was unsuccessful. In January 1928 The Musical Times protested:
In 1927, the BBC took over the responsibility for the Promenade Concerts, widely known as "the Proms". At first Henry Wood, the founding conductor, persuaded the corporation to engage his Queen's Hall Orchestra for each Prom season; from 1930 onwards, the BBC provided the orchestra.
The inadequacy of the BBC's players, and also of the established London orchestras, was shown up by the Berlin Philharmonic, under Wilhelm Furtwängler, in two concerts in 1927. A historian of the Queen's Hall, Robert Elkin, writes, "At this period the standard of orchestral playing in London was distinctly low, and the well-drilled efficiency of the Berliners under their dynamic conductor came as something of a revelation." These, and later concerts by the same orchestra, gained plaudits from the public and music critics at the expense of the London orchestras. The chief music critic of The Times, Frank Howes, later commented, "the British public ... was electrified when it heard the disciplined precision of the Berlin Philharmonic... This apparently was how an orchestra could, and, therefore, ought to sound". After the Berliners, London heard a succession of major foreign orchestras, including the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra under Willem Mengelberg and the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York under Arturo Toscanini.
thumb|upright|150px|right|[[John Reith, 1st Baron Reith|John Reith, Director-General of the BBC]]
Among those determined that London should have a permanent orchestra of similar excellence were Reith and the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. The latter aimed at setting up a first-rate ensemble for opera and concert performances and, though no admirer of broadcasting, he was willing to negotiate with the BBC if this gave him what he sought. Reith's concern was that the BBC should have a first-rate radio orchestra. The critic Richard Morrison writes: <blockquote>Reith's BBC of the 1920s was ... imbued with an almost religious zeal for "enlightening" the public through the magical medium of the wireless. An orchestra, and particularly one that was unencumbered by commercial constraints and thus free to deliver the highest of highbrow programmes, would fit very well into that idealistic philosophy.</blockquote> Landon Ronald brought Reith and Beecham together in April 1928; negotiations and preliminary arrangements continued for more than 18 months until it became clear that the corporation and the conductor had irreconcilable priorities for the proposed new ensemble. Beecham withdrew and, as described by Nicholas Kenyon: