Haifa Symphony Orchestra

Founded in 1950, two years after the state itself, the Haifa Symphony is the principal orchestra of northern Israel and for much of its life was known abroad as the North Israel Symphony Orchestra. It plays a subscription season in Haifa and serves the towns of the Galilee and the coastal north, with a repertory that runs from the Viennese classics through the Russian and American twentieth century, and it has long drawn on the extraordinary influx of players who arrived from the former Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s. Nayden Todorov was chosen from more than a hundred and fifty candidates as its permanent conductor in 1998.