Whatcom Symphony Orchestra Competitors

The Oregon Symphony is Portland’s largest performing arts organization and the oldest American orchestra west of the Mississippi. Led by Music Director David Danzmayr, it performs with many of the world’s top musicians and offers the best of orchestral music – classical to pops to cutting-edge contemporary – to growing audiences in Portland and across Oregon. The orchestra consists of 76 full-time musicians who perform more than 80 concerts each year in downtown Portland’s historic Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, to draw an enthusiastic audience of more than 225,000 people annually. Appointed in 2014, the Oregon Symphony's President and CEO is Scott Showalter.

The Seattle Symphony is one of America's leading symphony orchestras and is internationally acclaimed for its innovative programming and extensive recording history. The Symphony is heard from September through July by more than 500,000 people through live performances and radio broadcasts. It performs in one of the finest modern concert halls in the world — the acoustically superb Benaroya Hall — in downtown Seattle. Its extensive education and community engagement programs reach over 65,000 children and adults each year. The Seattle Symphony has a deep commitment to new music, commissioning many works by living composers each season. The orchestra has made nearly 150 recordings and has received three Grammy Awards, 23 Grammy nominations, two Emmy Awards and numerous other accolades. In 2014 the Symphony launched its in-house recording label, Seattle Symphony Media.

Founded in 1963, Seattle Opera is a leading American opera company. The company presents the classics of the European repertoire as well as new works of American opera. Seattle Opera performs five operas per year. Seattle Opera strives to produce musically extraordinary, theatrically compelling operas, employing uniformly high quality casts, dramatically aware conductors, and innovative yet textually concerned directors and designers. By continuing our emphasis on the work of Richard Wagner and by achieving national and international recognition for the quality of all our programming, Seattle Opera commits itself to advancing the cultural life of the Pacific Northwest through education and performance.