[2] The orchestra is resident at Lighthouse in Poole, with other major concert series given at Portsmouth Guildhall, the Great Hall of Exeter University and Bristol Beacon.

Principal conductors of the orchestra have included Sir Dan Godfrey, Rudolf Schwarz, Constantin Silvestri, Paavo Berglund, Andrew Litton, Marin Alsop, and Kirill Karabits.

[3] This flexible approach meant that the musicians could form a military band for open-air concerts (playing on Bournemouth Pier) or a more formal classical ensemble for indoor programmes.

The orchestra gave the UK premieres of major works by Richard Strauss, Camille Saint-Saëns and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

He cultivated connections with most of the prominent British composers of the day including Edward Elgar, Hamilton Harty, Alexander Mackenzie, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford, Ethel Smyth, Gustav Holst and the Australian Percy Grainger.

As part of Bournemouth's visitor attractions, any request for expansion of the orchestra or changes to their contracts were the subject of exhaustive debates in the Council chamber.

Radio broadcasts took place from the Pavilion and a number of celebrated composers visited during this time, including Igor Stravinsky, William Walton, Ernest John Moeran, Sergei Rachmaninov, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner and Percy Grainger.

Charles Groves took over as musical director in 1951, but a rising annual deficit and termination of players' contracts caused a crisis, averted only by support from the Winter Gardens Society.

In 1957 Groves and the orchestra made commercial recordings, for Classics Club, (with a local engineer from Ronaldsons of Southbourne), of Beethoven's 4th Symphony, Brahms's Academic Festival Overture and Bizet's L'Arlésienne Suite.

In 1962, Constantin Silvestri became principal conductor and raised the standard and profile of the orchestra, with an appearance at the Edinburgh Festival in 1963, a first European tour in 1965, notable recordings and regular radio broadcasts.

Paavo Berglund's tenure as principal conductor from 1972 to 1979 included commercial recordings such as the complete symphonies of Jean Sibelius for EMI.

Berglund led the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra with distinction, significantly raising the performing standards, as can be heard from the many recordings made by it for EMI.

[This quote needs a citation]Edward Greenfield wrote in a review of a concert by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and Paavo Berglund in The Guardian in 1972, that the brilliantly richful strings left behind many interpretations from London.

In February 1997 Litton's recording of Walton's Belshazzar's Feast with the BSO, Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and soloist Bryn Terfel won a Grammy Award.

Whilst he made no commercial recordings with the orchestra, he and the BSO toured the United States, including their debut at Carnegie Hall in April 1997.

[11] Her time with the orchestra continued the programming of American repertoire from Litton's tenure, which she often introduced to the audience from the podium in the style of her mentor Leonard Bernstein.

[16] The BSO's first commercial recording with Karabits (of Rodion Shchedrin's Concertos for Orchestra Nos 4 and 5) was released on the Naxos label in April 2010.

[26] In 1968, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta was founded, with a complementary remit to tour the smaller towns of the south and west, as well as concentrating on classical repertoire.

In September 1995 the orchestra, conducted by Richard Hickox, was the first to give a complete concert cycle of the symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

10, conducted by Simon Rattle; Elgar's In the South (Alassio) with Constantin Silvestri, Tchaikovsky's 2nd Piano Concerto with Rudolf Barshai and Peter Donohoe as soloist (with Nigel Kennedy and Steven Isserlis in the slow movement); Anthony Payne's completion of Elgar's 3rd Symphony with Paul Daniel, and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with Marin Alsop.

For many years until his death in 2003, Ron Goodwin gave an annual series of Christmas concerts with the orchestra around the south and west of England.

The Pathé archive contains short films of the orchestra conducted by Dan Godfrey and Richard Austin made at the Pavilion Theatre in 1930 and 1937.

In 1963, the nave of Winchester Cathedral was cleared for the first time in several hundred years to enable a live television broadcast of the orchestra, conducted by Constantin Silvestri, performing Wagner's "Good Friday Music" from Parsifal.

The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra recording of Gustav Holst's The Planets, conducted by George Hurst, was used on the soundtrack of Nicolas Roeg's film The Man Who Fell to Earth.