Since its founding, the orchestra has had 17 music directors, including George Henschel, Serge Koussevitzky, Henri Rabaud, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg and James Levine.

For the orchestra, Henschel devised innovative orchestral seating charts and sent them to Brahms, who replied approvingly and commented on the issues raised by horn and viola sections in a letter of mid-November 1881.

[3] The program consisted of Beethoven's The Consecration of the House, as well as music by Joseph Haydn, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Franz Schubert and Carl Maria von Weber.

The orchestra's four subsequent music directors were all trained in Austria, including the seminal and highly influential Hungarian-born conductor Arthur Nikisch, in accordance with the tastes of Higginson.

He decided not to offer the position to Gustav Mahler, Fritz Steinbach, and Willem Mengelberg but did not rule out the young Bruno Walter if nobody more senior were to accept.

Following American entry into World War I, Muck (born in Germany but a Swiss citizen since childhood), was falsely accused by unscrupulous newspaper editor John R. Rathom of knowingly refusing a request to play The Star Spangled Banner.

Along with 29 of the BSO best musicians, Muck was imprisoned in Fort Oglethorpe, a German-American internment camp in the State of Georgia, without trial or appeal until the summer after the Armistice, when he and his wife agreed that be deported to neutral Denmark.

They also gave the premiere of Béla Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, which had been commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation at the instigation of Fritz Reiner and Joseph Szigeti.

11) and Henri Dutilleux for its 75th anniversary, Roger Sessions, and Andrzej Panufnik, for the 100th, and lately for the 125th works by Leon Kirchner, Elliott Carter, and Peter Lieberson.

Although Koussevitsky recommended his protégé Leonard Bernstein to be his successor after he retired in 1949,[8] the BSO awarded the position to the Alsatian maestro Charles Munch, who would lead until 1962.

"[10] After Steinberg's retirement, according to BSO trustee John Thorndike (who was on the search committee) the symphony's board spoke to Colin Davis and "investigated very thoroughly" his appointment, but Davis's commitments to his young family did not allow his moving to Boston from England;[11] instead he accepted the post of BSO principal guest conductor, which he held from 1972 to 1984.

[11] The committee eventually chose Seiji Ozawa, who became Music Director in 1973 and held the post until 2002, the longest tenure of any Boston Symphony conductor.

Greg Sandow wrote in The Wall Street Journal in December 1998 that Ozawa "had taken control of the school with what many people thought was surprising and abrupt brutality.

[15]A more basic concern involved perceived shortcomings in Ozawa's musical leadership; as Sandow wrote in the 1998 article, "what mattered far more was how badly the BSO plays.

"[13] He noted that a group of Boston Symphony musicians had privately published a newsletter, Counterpoint, expressing their concerns; in the summer of 1995[16] concertmaster Malcolm Lowe and principal cellist Jules Eskin wrote that in rehearsal Ozawa gave no "specific leadership in matters of tempo and rhythm," no "expression of care about sound quality," and no "distinctly-conveyed conception of the character of each piece the BSO plays.

I'd heard the charge about Japanese money while I was writing my piece, so I asked Mark Volpe, the BSO's General Manager, what he thought of it.

Jan Swafford wrote: Now and then he gave a standout performance, usually in the full-throated late-Romantic and 20th-century literature, but most of the time what came out was glittering surfaces with nothing substantial beneath: no discernable concept, no vision.

[10]In a 2013 survey of recordings of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, the composer Russell Platt wrote in The New Yorker: Seiji Ozawa's downright depressing account, recorded in 1979: the Boston Symphony Orchestra's sonic shine, developed by Ozawa's predecessors Monteux and Charles Munch, is audibly dripping away, its dispirited musicians losing their sense of individual responsibility to the score.

Levine received critical praise for revitalizing the quality and repertoire since the beginning of his tenure, including championing contemporary composers.

[29] In October 2020, the BSO announced a further extension of Nelsons' contract as music director through August 2025, with an evergreen clause for automatic renewal.

[32][33] On July 2, 2018, BSO principal flautist Elizabeth Rowe filed a lawsuit in the Superior Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, claiming pay discrimination on the basis of gender.

[39] Subsequent events related to the COVID-19 pandemic included the following: In succession to Mark Volpe, Gail Samuel became the BSO's president and chief executive officer in June 2021, the first woman to be named to the posts in the history of the orchestra.

[50] The Boston Symphony made its first acoustical recordings in 1917 in Camden, New Jersey, for the Victor Talking Machine Company conducted by Karl Muck.

Leonard Bernstein made records for both Columbia and DG with the BSO, including selections from his last concert ever as a conductor on August 19, 1990, at Tanglewood.

The BSO has also appeared on Decca with Vladimir Ashkenazy, with Charles Dutoit and André Previn for DG, and on Phillips and Sony Classical with Bernard Haitink.

Films such as Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan (both composed and conducted by John Williams) were recorded by the orchestra at Symphony Hall.

The initial recordings included live concert performances of William Bolcom's 8th Symphony and Lyric Concerto, the latter with flutist James Galway, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, the Brahms Ein deutsches Requiem, and Ravel's complete Daphnis et Chloé,[53] which won the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance.

[54] In April 2015, the BSO announced a new recording partnership with Deutsche Grammophon that focuses on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, with Nelsons as conductor.

In the 1974–1975 American television situation comedy Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, several cast members played fictional personnel of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Guest stars who appeared as musicians playing in or with the orchestra during the show's 15-episode run included Henry Winkler as a cellist, Leon Askin as a violinist, and Susan Neher as a flutist.