The Minnesota Orchestra is recognized for distinguished performances around the world, award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts and educational programs, and commitment to building the repertoire of the future. Founded in 1903 as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble played its first regional tour in 1907, debuted at Carnegie Hall in 1912, and has returned for regular New York performances ever since. The Orchestra, known since 1968 as the Minnesota Orchestra, has toured to Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East. Among its first nine music directors were Eugene Ormandy, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Antal Dorati, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Neville Marriner and Edo de Waart. In 2003 the Orchestra welcomed its tenth music director, Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, who guides a season encompassing nearly 200 concerts that are heard live by 350,000 individuals, and education and outreach programs that serve 85,000 music lovers of all ages. Thousands also hear the Orchestra via live regional broadcasts and such national programs as SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first ensembles to be heard on recordings and radio. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim. Since completing an internationally acclaimed cycle of the complete Beethoven symphonies and a two-CD set of Tchaikovsky’s piano-and-orchestra works, the Orchestra has undertaken a Beethoven piano concerto project, as well Sibelius and Bruckner recordings.

From its inception, the Orchestra has nourished a strong commitment to contemporary composers. It has premiered and/or commissioned nearly 300 compositions, including works by John Adams, Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Charles Ives, Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, as well as Composer Laureate Dominick Argento, Conductor Laureate Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Aaron Jay Kernis, who directs the Orchestra’s Composer Institute. The Orchestra has received 19 awards for adventuresome programming from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), including four Leonard Bernstein Awards for Educational Programming and, in 2008, the John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music.