Boston Symphony Chamber Players

One of the world’s most distinguished chamber music ensembles sponsored by a major symphony orchestra and made up of principal players from that orchestra, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players include first-chair string and wind players from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 

The BSCP was founded in 1964 during Erich Leinsdorf’s tenure as BSO music director. The flexibility of the ensemble ensures that it can perform virtually any work within the vast chamber music literature, expanding their range by calling upon other BSO members or enlisting the services of guest artists, who have included such performers as pianists Thomas Ades, Emanuel Ax, and André Previn and vocalists Thomas Hampson, Ben Heppner, Dominique Labelle, and Dawn Upshaw. 

The Chamber Players present an annual four-concert series in Boston’s Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory and perform each season at Tanglewood. The ensemble has toured in Europe, Japan, South America, and the Soviet Union, and in September 2008 performed on the Queen Mary 2‘s transatlantic crossing from New York to Southampton, England, sponsored by Cunard® Line. The Chamber Players have recorded many of the great works of the chamber music repertoire, including the Mozart and Brahms quintets for clarinet and strings, Brahms string quintets, Second Viennese School transcriptions of Johann Strauss II waltzes, Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat with narrator Sir John Gielgud, Debussy chamber music, works by Quincy Porter, Elliott Carter, John Harbison, Aaron Copland, and Leon Kirchner, and much more. Releases on the BSO’s own BSO Classics label include Mozart chamber music for winds and strings; American chamber music by William Bolcom, Lukas Foss, Michael Gandolfi, and Osvaldo Golijov; the Grammy-nominated Profanes et Sacrées, chamber music by Ravel, Debussy, Tomasi, Françaix, and Dutilleux, and, most recently, serenades by Brahms and Dvořák.