The top 20 orchestras in the world

In 2008 Gramophone magazine published a list of the world's top 20 orchestras, collating the views of some of the world's top music critics and journalists, and their own staff. Here are their top 20, with helpful links to their concert schedules as listed on Bachtrack.

1. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam
2. Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra
3. Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
4. London Symphony Orchestra
5. Chicago Symphony Orchestra
6. Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
7. The Cleveland Orchestra
8. Los Angeles Philharmonic
9. Budapest Festival Orchestra
10. Dresden Staatskapelle
11. Boston Symphony Orchestra
12. New York Philharmonic
13. San Francisco Symphony
14. Mariinsky Theater Orchestra
15. Russian National Orchestra
16. St Petersburg Philharmonic
17. Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
18. Metropolitan Opera Orchestra
19. Saito Kinen Symphony Orchestra
20. Czech Philharmonic

Seven years later, in September 2015, Bachtrack conducted its own poll of professional music critics, producing a list of 10 of the world's greatest orchestras – some interesting changes in the intervening seven years – and world's greatest conductors. See this link for the results.

And eight years after that, we repeated the exercise in September 2023's Critics' Choice article. Click on this link to see how the landscape has changed in the 15 years (and one global pandemic) since Gramophone's original piece.