Awarded royal patronage by Her Late Majesty The Queen in 1977, its special status in the UK’s cultural life was cemented in 2007 when it was recognised as one of Scotland’s five National Performing Companies, supported by the Scottish Government.
Led by Music Director Thomas Søndergård, the Orchestra performs across Scotland, including concerts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Perth and Inverness and appears regularly at the Edinburgh International Festival and the BBC Proms. The RSNO tours internationally, most recently visiting the USA, China and Europe.
The RSNO has a worldwide reputation for the quality of its recordings, receiving a 2020 Gramophone Classical Music Award for Chopin’s Piano Concertos (soloist: Benjamin Grosvenor), conducted by Elim Chan, two Diapason d’Or awards (Denève/Roussel 2007; Denève/Debussy 2012) and eight GRAMMY Award nominations. In recent years, the RSNO has increasingly recorded soundtracks for film, television and video games, with notable titles including Horizon: An American Saga (Warner Bros.), Life on Our Planet (Netflix), Star Wars Outlaws (Ubisoft), Avatar Frontiers of Pandora (Meta Quest VR) and The Woman King (Sony Pictures). The Orchestra records at its bespoke in-house facility, Scotland’s Studio, in Glasgow.
The RSNO believes that music can enrich lives and aims to inspire, educate and entertain people throughout Scotland and beyond with its performances, recordings and engagement programmes. Supporting schools, families, young professionals and wider communities, the RSNO delivers high quality initiatives for all ages and abilities, reaching over 68,000 people in 2023. Recent additions to the RSNO’s engagement offering have included an expansion of its singing strand to encompass Chorus Academies in Dundee and Glasgow, a lunchtime Workplace Choir and a Buggy Choir, in addition to the established and highly respected RSNO Youth Choruses and RSNO Chorus. The community choruses are designed with the benefits of group singing for health and wellbeing at their core and are open to all.
