Tanglewood Festival Chorus performing in Boston, New York and Tanglewood. In 1970, John Oliver proposed to the management of the Boston Symphony Orchestra that he would create a permanent chorus for the orchestra, which had relied on various area choruses for much of its history. In Oliver's words, "To my utter amazement now--I wasn't amazed then, because I was just a brash young man--they said, 'Go! Form a chorus.'" The TFC's first concert was a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Symphony Hall in April 1970 when Leonard Bernstein substituted for William Steinberg who had fallen ill. Bernstein had been engaged to conduct
Charles Ansbacher Boston, Moscow, Bishkek, and Sarajevo. Among his acclaimed performances were an all-Brahms program at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and the same work in Belgrade with American and Russian soloists. In 2008, he was the first American conductor to appear with the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra. The performance was received so well that he was invited to return to the podium in 2009. He also conducted the first-ever symphony orchestra concert in Boston’s historic Fenway Park, and in Hanoi as the first American ever to lead the Vietnamese National Symphony Orchestra. His primary