Having given its first concert in 1950, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra has since expanded from a part-time ensemble of forty players to an internationally renowned orchestra of eighty-five full-time musicians. As Iceland’s national orchestra, resident at Harpa concert hall in Reykjavik and funded in large part by the Icelandic state and the city of Reykjavík, it gives around sixty concerts each season, its repertoire ranging from traditional classical works to contemporary and film music. It has worked with such renowned musicians as Daniel Barenboim, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Mstislav Rostropovich, Radu Lupu, Claudio Arrau, and Evelyn Glennie. Currently Conductor Laureate, Vladimir Ashkenazy has conducted the Orchestra regularly since the early 1970s. Rumon Gamba was its Chief Conductor and Music Director from 2002 to 2010, succeeded by Ilan Volkov in September 2011. The Orchestra’s wide-ranging international discography includes highly praised cycles of the symphonies of Sibelius and orchestral works by Jón Leifs. The first volume in the series devoted to orchestral works by Vincent d’Indy with Rumon Gamba was nominated for a Grammy award in 2008, and the second volume was an Editor’s Choice in Gramophone. During recent tours in Europe and the United States, the Iceland Symphony Orchestra appeared at the Wiener Musikverein and, twice, in Carnegie Hall, New York. Writing in The New York Times, the critic Alex Ross described its performance under Osmo Vänskä as ‘sensational… one of the finest Sibelius performances I have encountered’.