An ambassador of Polish musical culture since its inception, the Orchestra has been a regular guest on foreign and domestic stages for forty years. Its foreign tours involve thousands of meetings with conductors, composers, soloists, and lastly but most importantly, audiences.

The ensemble continues the tradition of Jerzy Maksymiuk’s Polish Chamber Orchestra, founded in 1972, from which it emerged as a result of its enlargement. The impulse to expand the ensemble was provided in 1984 by the arrival of the legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who soon took over as the first guest conductor at the invitation of directors Franciszek Wybrańczyk and Waldemar Dąbrowski. “Working with no other orchestra gave me as much satisfaction as my work, as soloist and conductor, with the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra,” he would say in interviews.

Over the years, Sinfonia Varsovia has played more than four thousand concerts, performing in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls under conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Emmanuel Krivine, Witold Lutosławski, Lorin Maazel, Jerzy Maksymiuk, and Krzysztof Penderecki (the latter was its music and later artistic director in 1997–2020), and alongside soloists such as Piotr Anderszewski, Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Gidon Kremer, Nikolai Lugansky, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Maria João Pires, and Mstislav Rostropovich.

Sinfonia Varsovia has recorded more than 300 albums for Decca, Deutsche Grammophon, Naxos, Sony, Warner, and other labels, comprising works from the 18th century to the present day. The music of Polish composers holds a special place in the Orchestra’s concert programmes. It has given world premieres of numerous works by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Paweł Mykietyn, and Krzysztof Penderecki, among others.

Sinfonia Varsovia has initiated a competition for the architectural design of a music centre including Poland’s largest concert hall to date, now under construction with financial support of the Capital City of Warsaw.

Since 2004, the Orchestra has been directed by Janusz Marynowski.