Powell Symphony Hall houses the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1880 and the second-oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. The building itself has a rich and layered history: it opened in 1925 as the St. Louis Theater, a movie palace and vaudeville house. In 1966 it was saved from demolition by the Symphony, which purchased and renovated it as a concert hall, renaming it for Walter Powell, a philanthropist whose donation made the restoration possible.
The Symphony moved in the following year, and Powell Hall became one of the most celebrated concert venues in the country, renowned for its extraordinary acoustics — warm, enveloping, and precise, the result of a renovation that preserved the original plaster walls and ornate interior detailing. The St. Louis Symphony has been led by some of the world's great conductors: Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson, and Stéphane Denève. Slatkin, who led the orchestra from 1979 to 1996, brought it to international prominence and made a series of recordings that are still considered benchmark interpretations.
Classical music in St. Louis has always had a strong German-American foundation — the city's 19th-century German immigrant community supported both the symphony and a robust amateur music-making tradition.