The Grammy Award Winning Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1935. Since 1940, the Orchestra's permanent home has been Kleinhans Music Hall, a National Historic Site with an international reputation as one of the finest concert halls in the United States.

As Buffalo's cultural ambassador, the BPO has toured widely across the United States and Canada including the recently completed Florida Friends Tour with JoAnn Falletta in March 2010, the first multi-city tour since the 1988 European tour and the first outside of the WNY area since Maestro Falletta led the ensemble at Carnegie Hall in 2004. Other concerts include the Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, Boston's Symphony Hall, San Francisco's Davies Hall, Montreal's Place des Arts, and twenty-two appearances at Carnegie Hall.

Currently, the Orchestra presents more than one hundred and twenty Classics, Pops and Youth Concerts each year and the award winning BPO Education programs reach over 35,000 students per year (K-12) from all eight counties of Western New York.

Over the decades, the BPO has matured in stature under the batons of some of the leading stars of the podium. William Steinberg, Josef Krips, Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, Maximiano Valdez, Semyon Bychkov and Julius Rudel are among the luminaries who have served as music directors of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

During the tenure of current music director JoAnn Falletta, the BPO has rekindled its distinguished history of NPR broadcasts and recordings, including the release of eleven new CDs of a highly diverse repertoire on the NAXOS and Beau Fleuve labels. The Philharmonic’s Naxos recording of composer John Corigliano’s “Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan,” featuring soprano Hila Plitmann, won Grammys in two categories of the three for which it was nominated: classical vocal performance and classical contemporary composition.