It was founded in 1933 and has consolidated, over the years, a fruitful relationship with the major Italian conductors, including Tullio Serafin, Vittorio Gui, Antonino Votto, Guido Cantelli, Franco Ferrara, Franco Capuana, Willy Ferrero, and with composers such as Ottorino Respighi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Ermanno Wolf Ferrari, Riccardo Zandonai, Alfredo Casella. The appearances on the podium of Lorin Maazel, Lovro von Matacic, Claudio Abbado, Sergiu Celibidache, Riccardo Muti date back to the 1950s and 1960s, and collaborations with Gioconda De Vito, Leonid Kogan, Henryk Szering, Andrés Navarra, Dino Ciani, Maria Tipo, Nikita Magaloff, Wilhem Kempff, Martha Argerich. In recent years the Orchestra has collaborated, among others, with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Georges Prêtre, Emmanuel Krivine, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ton Koopman, Iván Fischer, Frans Brüggen, Carlo Maria Giulini, Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, Neville Marriner, Christopher Hogwood, Hartmut Haenchen and with soloists such as Martha Argerich, Aldo Ciccolini, Kim Kashkashian, Viktoria Mullova, Misha Maisky, Truls Mørk, Sabine Meyer, Yuri Bashmet, Salvatore Accardo. From 1999 to 2005, Gérard Korsten was Music Director, conducting, among other things, the national premieres of Richard Strauss’s Die ägyptische Helena, Weber’s Euryanthe and Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet, while in the 2007-2008 season George Pehlivanian was Principal Guest Conductor. In recent years, the Orchestra has worked regularly with Lorin Maazel, touring Europe in 1999 and performing a series of successful concerts. In 2002, it represented Italy in the “Italienische Nacht” series, organised by the Bayerischer Rundfunk at the Gasteig in Munich and broadcast live by Bavarian Radio. In 2005, it played at a concert in honour of the President of the Italian Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. In 2010, it participated in the 98th Wiesbaden Festival with Lucia di Lammermoor conducted by Stefano Ranzani and directed by Denis Krief, achieving great success. Recently, as part of an internationalization project of the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari, created and promoted in collaboration with the European Union, the Italian Government and the Region of Sardinia, the Orchestra was invited by the New York City Opera to perform Respighi’s La campana sommersa, receiving acclaim from audiences and critics. In recent years, also as part of the “Cinque passi nel Novecento” festival, it has performed, in world premiere, compositions for orchestra that the Teatro Lirico di Cagliari commissioned from composers such as Sylvano Bussotti, Giorgio Tedde, Azio Corghi, Fabio Nieder, Alberto Colla, Carlo Boccadoro, Franco Oppo, Francesco Antonioni, Ivan Fedele, Michele Dall’Ongaro, Filippo Del Corno, Vittorio Testa, Sergio Rendine, Orazio Sciortino. For the Dynamic record company he has recorded works which were performed for the first time in Italy, such as: Die Feen by Wagner, Dalibor by Smetana (awarded, respectively, by “Musica e Dischi” as the best Italian operatic album of 1997, and by “Opéra International” with the “Timbre de Platine” – January 2001), Čerevički and Opričnik by Čajkovskij, Die ägyptische Helena by Richard Strauss, Euryanthe by Weber, Alfonso und Estrella by Schubert, Hans Heiling by Marschner, Chérubin by Massenet, Lucia di Lammermoor by Donizetti. He has also recorded Goyescas by Granados and La vida breve by De Falla, The Passion according to St. John by Bach, La sonnambula by Bellini, I Shardana by Porrino for Dynamic, Don Pasquale for Rai Trade and The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronija by Rimsky-Korsakov for Naxos. For Rai he recorded, in 1998, La Bohème which was broadcast all over the world.