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
Seattle Civic Symphony Orchestra to attract violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Sr. to solo with the orchestra for its concert on November 25, 1923, and pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch for its concert on May 4, 1924, both at the Metropolitan Theater. Despite these artistic successes, the May 4, 1924 concert marked the final appearance of the Seattle Civic Symphony Orchestra, apparently due to financial problems. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra was revived in 1926 under the direction of Karl Krueger after a five-year hiatus. Despite subsequent embellishments that Mary Davenport Engberg was the Seattle Symphony Orchestra's first female conductor, she in fact was never the director of the