A string orchestra is an orchestra consisting solely of a string section made up of the bowed strings used in Western Classical music. The instruments of such an orchestra are most often the following: the violin, which is divided into first and second violin players, the viola, the cello, and usually, but not always, the double bass.
Johan Halvorsen was a Norwegian composer, conductor and violinist.
Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, pedagogue and pianist.
Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and music director of the San Francisco Symphony.
Frederick Stock was a German conductor and composer, most famous for his 37-year tenure as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Hilding Constantin Rosenberg was a Swedish composer and conductor. He is commonly regarded as the first Swedish modernist composer, and one of the most influential figures in 20th-century classical music in Sweden.
Aulis Sallinen is a Finnish contemporary classical music composer. His music has been variously described as "remorselessly harsh", a "beautifully crafted amalgam of several 20th-century styles", and "neo-romantic". Sallinen studied at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Joonas Kokkonen. He has had works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, and has also written seven operas, eight symphonies, concertos for violin, cello, flute, horn, and English horn, as well as several chamber works. He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1978 for his opera Ratsumies.
Uuno (Kalervo) Klami was a Finnish composer of the modern period. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant Finnish composers to emerge from the generation that followed Jean Sibelius.
Richard Anthony Sayer Arnell was an English composer of classical music. Arnell composed in all the established genres for the concert stage, and his list of works includes six completed symphonies and six string quartets. At the Trinity College of Music, he "promoted a pioneering interest in film scores and electronic music" and jazz.
Arnold Atkinson Cooke was a British composer.
Ole Olsen was a Norwegian organist, composer, conductor and military musician.
Lars-Erik Larsson was a Swedish composer.
Bernard (George) Stevens was a British composer.
Anthony Vincent Benedictus Collins was a British composer and conductor. He scored around 30 films in the US and the UK between 1937 and 1954, and composed the British light music classic Vanity Fair in 1952. His Decca recordings of the seven Sibelius symphonies was only the second cycle by a single conductor and orchestra to appear.
Ross Pople is a New Zealand-born British conductor. He is the principal conductor of the London Festival Orchestra. He has worked with Yehudi Menuhin, Clifford Curzon, David Oistrakh, Kentner, George Malcolm, Sir Adrian Boult, Rudolf Kempe, Benjamin Britten, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki, Michael Tippett, Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein, George Benjamin, John Casken, Edwin Roxburgh, Luciano Berio, John Taverner, Malcolm Arnold, Pierre Boulez as well as many other major orchestras, choirs and soloists.
Ján Zimmer was a Slovak post-romantic composer and pianist.
