The Yale Philharmonia, led by Principal Conductor Peter Oundjian, is one of America’s foremost music school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Yale Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire.

Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall as well as Yale Opera productions. The Yale Philharmonia has performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Symphony Hall in Boston, and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Recent appearances at Carnegie Hall as part of the Yale in New York series have been praised by The New York Times as “sensational” and “tightly wrought, polished, and dramatic.” The Yale Philharmonia has toured in France and Italy, and in 2008 undertook its first tour of Asia, with acclaimed performances in the Seoul Arts Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall and National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.

The beginnings of orchestral music at Yale can be traced to 1894, when an orchestra was organized under the leadership of the school’s first dean, Horatio Parker. Guest conductors who have worked with the orchestra in recent years include John Adams, Marin Alsop, William Christie, James Conlon, Valery Gergiev, Giancarlo Guerrero, Carolyn Kuan, Jahja Ling, Krzysztof Penderecki, David Robertson, Leonard Slatkin, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, and Jean-Marie Zeitouni.