Free online concert streaming of BSO, boston pops, and tanglewood programs in the Bso media center
In partnership with 99.5 WCRB, a service of WGBH, the 128 kbps streams are provided by WCRB's live concert broadcasts and made available through the BSO Media Center the week after the program's premiere at Symphony Hall and the Shed at Tanglewood. 

Listen to the BSO Concert
Broadcasts from the Past Year
These concert streams will be available on  bso.org/mediacenter  for up to a year after the original performance, surpassing the usual industry standard of just a few weeks.

Listen Now in the BSO Media Center

BSO concerts are broadcast regularly on 99.5 WCRB, a service of WGBH. Saturday evening concerts are broadcast live on 99.5 in Boston and 88.7 in Providence, on HD radio at 89.7 HD2 in Boston, and online -both live and archived at www.classicalwcrb.org. Live and archived BSO concerts can also be streamed online at www.bso.org. Listeners can enjoy the BSO Concert Channel online, a continuous high-quality audio stream of live BSO performances from Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. In addition, BSO concerts are now heard throughout New England and upstate New York, on a network of stations including WAMC in Albany, NY (www.wamc.org), WMNR in Monroe, CT (www.wmnr.org), Vermont Public Radio, New England Public Radio, and New Hampshire Public Radio. BSO broadcasts 99.5 WCRB begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday nights, and are repeated at 8 p.m. on Monday evenings.

A Brief History of The BSO Broadcasts

The BSO's first live concert broadcast took place on January 23, 1926, initiating a series of Boston Symphony broadcasts, privately-funded by Winfield S. Quinby, a "well-known Boston coffee merchant," that continued through the 1927-28 season. Winfield also sponsored nine Saturday-night Boston Pops concerts in the spring of 1926, marking the first Boston Pops broadcasts. From late 1932 until 1938, BSO concerts were carried-though not always on a regular basis-by NBC. Following the Tanglewood Music Shed inaugural broadcast on August 4, 1938, the BSO, as a non-union orchestra, was barred from the air by the American Federation of Musicians. Broadcasts were resumed soon after the ratification of a union contract in December 1942, and national broadcasts of the Boston Pops began in the spring of 1943. The BSO broadcasts continued, first on NBC, then on ABC, through the 1947-48 season. No BSO concerts were broadcast from Symphony Hall during the 1948-49 season, though portions of BSO rehearsals were aired for three seasons starting in the fall of 1948 as part of the half-hour NBC series "The Boston Symphony Orchestra in Rehearsal," bringing the first stage in the orchestra's broadcasting history to a close.

On October 6, 1951, WGBH signed on the air for the first time with a live Boston Symphony broadcast, making it the longest continuous relationship between a broadcaster and symphony orchestra in the nation. From the mid- to late 1950s, NBC also carried portions of the BSO concerts, either live or on a tape-delayed basis. In the late 1950s, the Boston-area station WCRB began to carry the orchestra's Saturday-night concerts, as did a number of other stations, including New York's WQXR and the QXR network along the eastern seaboard. In October 1957, the Boston Symphony Transcription Trust-ultimately to become a joint venture of WGBH and WCRB-was created to produce BSO broadcast tapes for syndication throughout the country. Though syndication was discontinued for lack of funds in the early '90s, tapes are still made for the orchestra's archive, and live concerts from Symphony Hall and from Tanglewood, the orchestra's summer home in western Massachusetts, continue to be aired on 99.5 WCRB, a service of WGBH.