Symphony orchestra or philharmonic orchestra

The confusion is reasonable, because the two words look like technical terms. They are not. They are historical accidents, and the only way to understand which orchestra is which is to know when it was founded and by whom.

Where the two words came from

Symphony entered the language through the form. A symphony is a large multi-movement work for orchestra, so an orchestra assembled to play symphonies was a symphony orchestra. The word is descriptive in origin and became a name by repetition.

Philharmonic came from societies rather than from music. The word means a love of harmony, and it was the standard name for the subscription societies that put on concerts across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Philharmonic Society of London was founded in 1813 to give orchestral concerts in a city that had no permanent orchestra at all, and received its royal title a century later. When a body of players broke away from a society, or was formed in emulation of one, it took the word with it. By the twentieth century philharmonic simply meant an orchestra of a certain seriousness, which is to say it meant nothing measurable.

London, where the question answers itself

London is the clearest possible test case, because the city supports five full-size professional orchestras whose names use both words and whose work is indistinguishable in kind. All five play the standard symphonic repertoire, all five accompany concertos, all five record, and all five appear in the same handful of halls, the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican and the Royal Albert Hall among them.

Two of the five were founded by the same man, Sir Thomas Beecham, fourteen years apart, and he reached for the word philharmonic on both occasions. Walter Legge chose Philharmonia in 1945 because he wanted a name that sounded European and belonged to nobody else, and because his orchestra was built to make records rather than to fill a subscription series. None of those decisions had anything to do with what the players did once they were on the platform. Owain Arwel Hughes has held posts with two of these orchestras, as associate conductor of the Philharmonia and as principal associate conductor of the Royal Philharmonic, and the work involved was the same work in both buildings.

The BBC's own pair, which proves the point

The BBC employs both a BBC Symphony Orchestra and a BBC Philharmonic, and the difference between them is geography and remit, not species. The BBC Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1930, is the corporation's London orchestra and the resident orchestra of the Proms season at the Royal Albert Hall. The BBC Philharmonic works from Salford and grew out of the BBC's northern orchestra. Both are salaried contract orchestras, both broadcast, both give public concerts, both are full-size. The BBC also runs the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, founded in 1928 and based at BBC Hoddinott Hall in Cardiff, whose name carries neither word and which does exactly the same kind of work as the other two.

The words that do mean something

Four other terms in an orchestra's name are genuinely informative, because they describe size or repertoire rather than sentiment.

Chamber orchestra

Genuinely smaller, typically 20 to 40 players, with strings reduced to something near Haydn's proportions and often no trombones or tuba at all. A chamber orchestra plays Bach, Haydn, Mozart and twentieth-century works written for reduced forces, and frequently works without a conductor, directed from the leader's chair.

Sinfonietta

Literally a little symphony. As an orchestra's name it usually signals a flexible modern ensemble, smaller than symphonic size, with a bias towards contemporary repertoire.

Concert orchestra

A working term for an orchestra whose repertoire is lighter: film music, show scores, popular classics and broadcast work rather than the symphonic canon.

Camerata and sinfonia

Both indicate a small, often flexible body of players. Camerata Wales, founded in 2005 with Owain Arwel Hughes as its music director, uses the word in that sense.

What actually distinguishes one orchestra from another

If the name tells a listener nothing, four other things tell them a great deal.

• Who employs the players. A self-governing orchestra such as the London Symphony pays per engagement and is owned by its members. A contract orchestra such as the BBC Symphony salaries them.
• Which hall it lives in. The building shapes the sound more than the personnel do. A resident orchestra learns its own acoustic, which is why the same orchestra can sound like a different one on tour.
• Whether it plays in a pit. Welsh National Opera, founded in 1943 and resident at the Wales Millennium Centre, carries its own orchestra, and an opera orchestra's working life bears almost no resemblance to a concert orchestra's.
• Who conducts it, and for how many weeks. A music director who conducts fifteen weeks a year leaves a mark that a succession of guests cannot.

The practical advice is short: read the founding date, not the adjective. An orchestra's name records the taste of whoever registered it, usually decades before anybody now playing in it was born.

Also in this programme

• The orchestraHow a symphony orchestra is put together
• Orchestral instrumentsThe instruments of the orchestra, family by family
• What is a symphony?What a symphony is, and how it is built
• Wales Millennium CentreWhat is inside it, and who works there