With the Fort Worth Symphony celebrating its 100th anniversary, we look at a century of high notes.
1912 With 32 musicians, the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra debuts in a Fort Worth church. In the coming decades, it is disbanded during both World War I and World War II and later re-founded.
1972 John Giordano is named music director of the FWSO, then an ensemble with no full-time players and a budget of $80,000.
1976 Giordano creates the Fort Worth Chamber Orchestra, also known as the Texas Little Symphony. The chamber orchestra makes its Carnegie Hall debut in 1980 and undertakes a successful tour of China in 1983.
1980 Ann Koonsman is appointed general manager. Ten years later, she creates the wildly popular Concerts in the Garden, at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden.
1992 Famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti performs with the FWSO before an audience of 14,000 at the Tarrant County Convention Center.
1998 Bass Hall opens and becomes the new home of the FWSO.
2000 Miguel Harth-Bedoya is hired to succeed Giordano as music director and conductor.
2008 The full FWSO, now with 65 full-time players, makes its Carnegie Hall debut.
2010 After months of bitter negotiations, FWSO musicians agree to a 13 percent pay cut.
2012 A gravely ill Van Cliburn appears at an FWSO concert, congratulating the ensemble on its centennial anniversary.
