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
Ernst Hoffmann (conductor) En route to Indiana following a Christmas 1955 visit to their son in Houston, Ernst and Annemarie Hoffmann died in an automobile accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi, on January 3, 1956. Ernst Hoffmann (conductor) Ernst Heinrich Hoffmann (June 18, 1899–January 3, 1956) was an American conductor who served as the music director of the Houston Symphony for eleven years. Hoffmann was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father was a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Although Ernst was an accomplished musician in his youth, during which he studied piano with the noted Harold Bauer, he enrolled in the anthropology program at