The Orchestra played its first regional tour in 1907, performed its first major city concert in Chicago in 1911, and made its New York City debut in 1912 at Carnegie Hall. Outside the United States, the Minnesota Orchestra has played concerts in Australia, Canada, Europe, the Far East, Latin America and the Middle East. Performances in Carnegie Hall have been regular events for nearly nine decades.

In the early 1920s, the Minnesota Orchestra became one of the first to be heard on recordings, as well as on the radio—in 1923 it played a nationally broadcast concert under guest conductor Bruno Walter—and it has been recording and broadcasting ever since. Its landmark Mercury Living Presence LP recordings of the 1950s and 1960s, under music directors Antal Dorati and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, have been reissued on compact disc to great acclaim. The Orchestra has appeared on other labels as well, including Telarc, EMI/Angel, CBS, Philips, Argo, Virgin Classics and Reference Recordings.

Osmo Vänskä, the ensemble's tenth music director, has launched a five-year, five-disc initiative to record the complete Beethoven symphonies with the Minnesota Orchestra on the BIS label. To date, four albums have been released, all to rave reviews, including the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies—praised by the London Financial Times as the “modern Beethoven recording par excellence”—and the timeless Ninth, which received a 2008 Grammy nomination for “Best Orchestral Performance.”

In 1968, the Minneapolis Symphony, renamed the Minnesota Orchestra, continued on its path of distinctive membership in the ranks of top American symphonic ensembles. In 1974, the Orchestra moved into Orchestra Hall, its own home in downtown Minneapolis.

The 98-member ensemble now performs nearly 200 concerts each year. Its Friday night performances are broadcast live regionally by Minnesota Public Radio, and many concerts are subsequently featured on American Public Media's national programs, SymphonyCast and Performance Today.

In addition to traditional concerts, the Minnesota Orchestra connects with more than 85,000 music lovers annually through Young People's Concerts (YPs), Adventures in Music for Families programs and Kinder Konzerts. In the last decade more than half a million students have experienced a Minnesota Orchestra YP. Musicians also engage in such Minnesota Orchestra-sponsored initiatives as the Adopt-A-School program (founded in 1990) and Side-by-Side rehearsals and concerts with young area musicians.

The ensemble also offers numerous pops concerts, presenting the greatest contemporary pop performers in genres ranging from jazz and Big Band to Latin, country and world music. A sampling of recent pops performers with the Minnesota Orchestra include jazz legend Dave Brubeck,  pop icon Elvis Costello, country and bluegrass vocalist Kathy Mattea, Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, Latin band Tiempo Libre, trumpeter Doc Severinsen (the Orchestra’s Pops Conductor Laureate) and the Finnish vocal ensemble Rajaton, who performed the music of 1970’s super group ABBA with the Orchestra and Music Director Osmo Vänskä.

With a long history of commissioning and performing new music, the Minnesota Orchestra continues to nourish a strong commitment to contemporary composers. The ensemble has premiered and commissioned more than 175 compositions since 1903, including works by John Adams, Dominick Argento (Minnesota Orchestra Composer Laureate), Aaron Copland, John Corigliano, Charles Ives, Aaron Jay Kernis (Orchestra New Music Advisor), Libby Larsen, Stephen Paulus, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (Orchestra Conductor Laureate), and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. In addition, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) has bestowed upon the Minnesota Orchestra fourteen awards for adventuresome programming, including the 2004 Award for American Programming on a Foreign Tour, and the Leonard Bernstein Award for Education Programming in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

The Minnesota Orchestra welcomed Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä in the fall of 2003 as he took the podium as the ensemble's 10th music director. Praised for his intense and dynamic performances, Vänskä is recognized for compelling interpretations of the standard, contemporary, and Nordic repertoires, as well as the close rapport he establishes with the musicians he leads. During his tenure, he has drawn extraordinary reviews for concerts both at home and abroad—including a two-concert appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2007, highly acclaimed European tours in 2004 and 2006 and Minnesota tours in 2005, 2007 and 2008. Vänskä has extended his tenure with the Minnesota Orchestra through 2011.

Music Directors of the Minnesota Orchestra (Founded in 1903 as the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra)
	Emil Oberhoffer 1903-1922	Stanislaw Skrowaczewski 1960-1979
	Henri Verbrugghen 1923-1931	Sir Neville Marriner 1979-1986
	Eugene Ormandy 1931-1936	Edo de Waart 1986-1995
	Dimitri Mitropoulos 1937-1949	Eiji Oue 1995-2002
	Antal Dorati 1949-1960	Osmo Vänskä 2003-present
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Sandi Brown Public Relations Coordinator The Minnesota Orchestra 1111 Nicollet Mall Minneapolis, MN 55403 (612) 371-5641 phone sbrown@mnorch.org