Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Based in Glasgow, Scotland’s principal professional symphony orchestra performs and records unfamiliar and avant-garde music alongside vigorous and characterful accounts of relatively mainstream repertoire. Founded in 1891 as the Scottish Orchestra, it soon attracted some of the British Isles’ finest young musicians and drew praise from such distinguished visiting conductors as Richard Strauss. Its principal conductors have included John Barbirolli (1933-36) and George Szell (1936-39), who both worked with the Scottish Orchestra immediately before making their career move to the U.S. Under Walter Susskind (1946-52), the orchestra became a full-time salaried ensemble and changed its name to the Scottish National Orchestra (1950). Its longest-serving conductor, Alexander Gibson (1959-84), may be remembered for his strong affinity with Sibelius’ and Nielsen’s work, but also trained the orchestra to manage the most demanding of contemporary scores. They gave the British premiere of Stockhausen’s Gruppen for three orchestras in 1961—for this, they joined forces with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductors Norman Del Mar and John Carewe—and several works by Henze. Gibson also established Scottish Opera in 1962, the orchestra becoming its pit ensemble. In 1977, the orchestra came under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth II, and gained the Royal Scottish National Orchestra name in 1991. More recently, the RSNO has recorded extensively with Neeme Järvi (principal conductor, 1984-88) and, under Marin Alsop, a great deal of American music, including a complete edition of Samuel Barber’s orchestral works (rec. 1998-2003). In 2015, it moved into a new purpose-built RSNO Centre in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.