The Duke Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Harry Davidson, seeks to create an exciting and enlivening environment for concert-goers and performers alike.

The orchestra's repertoire ranges from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and includes both well-known masterpieces and rarely heard works. The ensemble consists of more than 90 musicians drawn mostly from the Duke University student body. Membership is open to all in the university community. The orchestra rehearses twice a week and gives more than four concerts a year.

Auditions for the 2009-2010 orchestra season will be held in the fall before the start of classes.

The Duke Symphony Orchestra closed its 2008-2009 season with an acclaimed performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on April 15. In a groundbreaking collaboration, Felix Mendelssohn's Overture and Incidental Music to William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (Opus 21 and 61) were presented with an abridged version of the play prepared under the supervision of R. Larry Todd, Daryl W. Palmer, and Jay O'Berski.

The orchestra was joined by members of the Antic Shakespeare Company (Jay O'Berski, director), the Durham Children's Chorus (Scott Hill, director), and guest soloists Jung Oh and Teresa Buchholz.

The performance was attended by the largest audience of any Duke Symphony Orchestra concert in history,

The Duke University Department of Music chair Dr. Stephen Jaffe congratulated the performers after the concert. "The interaction between Music and Theater Studies demonstrated far more than the sum of different parts; it demonstrated an intense and joyful focus of artistic study, practice, history's relevance, and fluency in performance which was of real interest to a large community."

In a review of the concert, John Lambert wrote "It was, in a word, terrific. If you weren't there, you ought to have been!"