Sinfonia Varsovia
Sinfonia Varsovia has served as an ambassador for Polish musical culture since its inception. For over 40 years, the orchestra has been a regular guest on stages both at home and abroad. Its travels have involved thousands of encounters with conductors, composers, soloists and, above all, with audiences.
The ensemble continues the tradition of Jerzy Maksymiuk’s Polish Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1972, from which it emerged following an expansion of the orchestra's line-up. The impetus for this was the arrival in 1984 of the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who soon took up the post of principal guest conductor at the invitation of the directors Franciszek Wybrańczyk and Waldemar Dąbrowski. ‘Working with no other orchestra has given me as much satisfaction as my work, both as a soloist and a conductor, with the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra’, Menuhin said in interviews.
Over the years, Sinfonia Varsovia has given more than 4.000 concerts, appearing in the world’s most prestigious concert halls under the baton of conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Emmanuel Krivine, Witold Lutosławski, Lorin Maazel, Jerzy Maksymiuk and Krzysztof Penderecki (who served as the orchestra’s music director from 1997 to 2020 and subsequently as its artistic director), and alongside soloists such as Piotr Anderszewski, Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Gidon Kremer, Yunchan Lim, Eric Lu, Nikolai Lugansky, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Maria João Pires and Mstislav Rostropovich.
Sinfonia Varsovia has recorded over 300 albums for labels such as Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, Sony and Warner, covering repertoire from 18th-century works to contemporary compositions. Music by Polish composers holds a special place in the orchestra’s concert programme. It has premiered numerous works by composers such as Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Paweł Mykietyn and Krzysztof Penderecki.
Sinfonia Varsovia – a cultural institution jointly run by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage – is the investor behind a project to build a music centre featuring the largest concert hall in Poland. The project is funded by the City of Warsaw and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. Janusz Marynowski has been the director of Sinfonia Varsovia since 2004.
[2026]