Orchestra Victoria

Orchestra Victoria — Melbourne’s pit orchestra

Orchestra Victoria is Australia’s principal opera and ballet pit orchestra, with around sixty musicians on the roster and a calendar built almost entirely around the Melbourne mainstage opera and ballet seasons. The orchestra is the resident pit band for The Australian Ballet, Opera Australia‘s Melbourne season, and Victorian Opera, which gives it the busiest opera-and-ballet workload of any Australian orchestra. The orchestra also runs a small-format symphonic and chamber music programme of its own, including the annual regional Victorian touring concerts.

The orchestra’s distinctive identity comes from the breadth of opera and ballet repertoire it works through in any given year — from the standard nineteenth-century romantic operatic and balletic repertoire (Verdi, Puccini, Tchaikovsky’s ballets) to the contemporary commissions of Victorian Opera and the modern ballet repertoire of The Australian Ballet (Stravinsky, Britten, Crystal Pite). Few Australian orchestras play through such a wide range of music in the regular working year.

Home venue

• Arts Centre Melbourne — State Theatre — as the resident pit orchestra for the major opera and ballet productions.

Useful links

• Official: orchestravictoria.com.au
• Where we cover them: Companies