The Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra (LSSO) is a youth orchestra based in Leicester, England. The players, aged between 15 and 18, are all drawn from secondary schools in the county of Leicestershire and the City of Leicester. History The Leicestershire County School of Music was the first of its kind, founded in 1948 by the county's first Music Adviser, Eric Pinkett O.B.E., with the backing of the Leicestershire education committee headed up by the visionary Director of Education, Stuart Mason. By the mid 1960s, Eric Pinkett – supported by the patronage of Sir Michael Tippett – had managed to put the LSSO on the UK musical map. The orchestra also established an international reputation due to its regular concert tours of major European cities, an annual tradition that started with visits to Essen in 1953, The Hague in 1954, Aarhus in 1955 and Oslo in 1956. Repertoire Over the years the orchestra's repertoire has included a number of specially commissioned works by composers such as Michael Tippett (The Shires Suite), David Bedford (Alleluia Timpanis), Bryan Kelly (Sancho Panza, Sinfonia Concertante), Anthony Milner (Te Deum), Alan Ridout (Concertante Music, Symphony No.2, Funeral Games for a Greek Warrior), Brian Bonsor (The Pied Piper of Hamelin), William Mathias (Sinfonietta), Herbert Baumann (Variations on an Old English Folk Song), and Herbert Chappell (Overture Panache). Conductors Since the late 1950s, many illustrious musicians have conducted the orchestra and these have included Michael Tippett, Alan Ridout, Arthur Bliss, Adrian Boult, Malcolm Arnold, Charles Groves, Norman Del Mar, George Weldon, Rudolf Schwarz, James Loughran, László Heltay, Herbert Chappell, Bryan Kelly, Alan Ridout, Herbert Baumann, Douglas Cameron, Lesley Woodgate, Stanford Robinson, Oivin Fjelstad, Bernard Keeffe, Alexander Goehr, Russell Burgess, Uri Segal, Havelock Nelson, Willy Gohl, Dan Vogel, Maurice Handford, Pierre Cao, Myung-whun Chung, Douglas Young, William Mathias, Martyn Brabbins, Stuart Johnson and André Previn. Broadcasts The orchestra has broadcast regularly on radio and television both at home and abroad, including an appearance in the BBC Omnibus programme The Other LSO with André Previn rehearsing them in works by Glinka, Beethoven and Rachmaninov and a series of programmes for BBC television in the mid 1980s called Music Time (see video links below). Several television programmes have featured Sir Michael Tippett and the orchestra and in 1968 a chamber group drawn from the LSSO appeared in the television series Sounds Exciting to perform Herbert Chappell's Dead in Tune with the