Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt

The Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt is an orchestra operating under the auspices of the German state of Brandenburg in the city of Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, or Frankfurt (Oder), not the larger city of Frankfurt-am-Main that is usually denoted by the Frankfurt name. The orchestra has a long regional history and has achieved international recognition since German reunification in 1991. Its ancestors date back to 1842, when an orchestra was established in the Frankfurt Stadttheater; the orchestra gained the backing of a Philharmonic Association in 1871, but that group dissolved in 1895. The theater orchestra continued to operate until the theater buildlng was destroyed during World War II. It was reconstituted in the city's new Kleist Theater after the war, and joined with a rival Frankfurter Kulturorchester to form the Philharmonisches Orchester Frankfurt (Oder) in 1971. The group gained its first non-German conductor in 1991 when Greece's Nikos Athineos ascended the podium. He was succeeded by Heribert Beissel, who remains active as an honorary conductor, and, in 2007, by British conductor Howard Griffiths. The orchestra split off from the Kleist Theater and came under Brandenburg state sponsorship, assuming the name Staatsorchester Frankfurt in 1995; in 2001 it took its present name. The orchestra draws its membership not only from Brandenburg but from the nearby Polish city of Slubice and its environs. Among the orchestra's innovative programming ideas is an annual Mitmach-Orchester (Participant Orchestra) event in which anyone who wishes may join the orchestra for an evening. Beginning with a 2006 recording of Mozart's flute concertos featuring Junko and Takao Ukigaya, the orchestra has been a frequent presence on the German recording scene, issuing albums mostly on the Klanglogo and CPO labels. For the former, they released a recording of Klaus Wüsthoff's tone poem Die Regentrude in 2018. The orchestra may be familiar to gamers for its recordings of music for Anno 1701 and The Witcher 3. ~ James Manheim