With a legacy dating back to 1895, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) is considered one of America’s finest and most versatile ensembles. In the 2025-26 season, Mӑcelaru joined the Orchestra as its 14th Music Director, after serving as Music Director Designate in the 2024-25 season, adding to the CSO’s distinguished roster of past music directors, including Leopold Stokowski, Eugène Ysaÿe, Fritz Reiner, Max Rudolf, Jesús López Cobos, Paavo Järvi and Louis Langrée. Matthias Pintscher is the Orchestra’s Creative Partner; previous artistic partners have included Lang Lang, Philip Glass, Branford Marsalis and Jennifer Higdon.

The CSO has long championed the composers and music of its time and has given historic American premieres of works by Claude Debussy, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, William Grant Still and other prominent composers. It has also commissioned many works that ultimately became mainstays of the classical repertoire, including Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. The Orchestra continues to actively commission new work, amplifying new voices from a diverse array of backgrounds.

Deeply committed to enhancing and expanding opportunities for the children of Greater Cincinnati, the Orchestra works to bring music education, in its many different forms, to as broad a public as possible. These efforts include two youth orchestras, the Nouveau Program, Musicians in Schools, the CSO Brass Institute and one of the longest running Young People’s Concerts series in the U.S., which was launched more than 100 years ago.

A leader in diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in the industry, the CSO was one of the first American orchestras to create a Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer position on its administrative team and the first to endow the role, ensuring the absorption of best DE&I practices into every facet of the organization in perpetuity. In 2007, the CSO created the Nouveau Program, which has supported increased participation in classical music and provided equitable opportunities for music study and performance for more than 80 African American and Latine student musicians. The CSO is also an incubator for and partner to Equity Arc, a consortium of American orchestras, professional musicians and educators established to address the lack of racial equity in the classical music field by aligning resources and collaborating to strengthen the trajectory of classical instrumentalists of color at all stages of their pre-careers.