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
Tanglewood Festival Chorus the Ninth as the closing concert of the Tanglewood season that summer and expressed a preference to conduct it at Symphony Hall rather than Beethoven's Fifth Symphony which Steinberg had been scheduled to conduct. In December 1994 the chorus joined Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra for tour performances in Hong Kong and Japan, the chorus' first performance overseas. In February 1998, singing from the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, the chorus represented the Americas when Seiji Ozawa led the Winter Olympics Orchestra with six choruses on five continents, all linked by satellite, in the "Ode to