London Symphony Orchestra 1966 Leonard Bernstein conducted the LSO for the first time, in Mahler's "Symphony of a Thousand" at the Royal Albert Hall. This was another coup for Fleischmann, who had to overcome Bernstein's scorn for the inadequate rehearsal facilities endured by London orchestras. Bernstein remained associated with the LSO for the rest of his life, and was its president from 1987 to 1990. Mindful of the enormous success of the Philharmonia Chorus, founded in 1957 by Legge to work with his Philharmonia Orchestra, the LSO decided to establish its own chorus. The LSO Chorus (later called the London Symphony Chorus) was
A Pastoral Symphony of peace. Like many of the composer's works, the "Pastoral Symphony" is not programmatic, but its spirit is very evocative. None of the movements are particularly fast or upbeat (the composer himself described it as "four movements, all of them slow"), but there are isolated extroverted sections. It was first performed in London on 16 January 1922, with Adrian Boult conducting. The symphony was dismissed by Constant Lambert, who wrote that its "creation of a particular type of grey, reflective, English-landscape mood has outweighed the exigencies of symphonic form". Peter Warlock's often-quoted comment that "it is all just a little