Which orchestras are the world’s greatest? Many people have come up with “definitive” lists. This seems to be a somewhat subjective category, though. How do you define “best?”
Sticking with lists that can be fact-checked seems less controversial. What if we seek out the world’s oldest orchestras instead? In doing so, we also encounter some of the best ones, since great age is always associated with more prestige. But even this category contains more gray areas than one might think. The websites to many orchestras all claim to be among “the world’s oldest.” So which one is really the oldest?
