Kleinhans Music Hall

History of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

As Buffalo’s cultural ambassador, the Grammy Award-winning Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under Music Director JoAnn Falletta presents more than 120 Classics, Pops and Youth Concerts each year and reaches over 40,000 students per year (K-12) across all eight counties of Western New York.

Since 1940, the orchestra’s permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Site with an international reputation as one of the finest concert halls in the United States. 

The BPO has toured widely across the United States and Canada including the recent Florida Friends Tour with JoAnn Fallettain March 2010, the first multi-city tour since the 1988 European tour. The BPO has been invited to perform at Carnegie Hall as a participant in the prestigious Spring for Music festival in 2013. This will be the orchestra's 24th appearance at Carnegie Hall and its first since Music Director JoAnn Falletta led the orchestra in a much heralded appearance there in June 2004.

Over the decades, the BPO has matured in stature under the batons of some of the leading stars of the podium. William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Maximiano Valdez, Semyon Bychkov and Julius Rudel are among the luminaries who have served as music directors of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

During the tenure of current music director JoAnn Falletta, the BPO has rekindled its distinguished history of NPR broadcasts and recordings, including the release of 20 new CDs of a highly diverse repertoire on the NAXOS and Beau Fleuve labels. The Philharmonic’s Naxos recording of composer John Corigliano’s “Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan,” featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, won Grammys in two categories of the three for which it was nominated: Classical Vocal Performance and Classical Contemporary Composition.