From the thousands of students who participated in the orchestra's live, interactive MusicMix programme to world-class soloists like mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and trumpeter Alison Balsom, the BBC Concert Orchestra doesn’t have mere colleagues, it has fans.

In-demand composers like Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and the Pet Shop Boys can work with any musicians they please. But time and again they choose to work with these 56 astonishingly adventurous musicians.

Under the batons of Keith Lockhart, Johannes Wildner and Barry Wordsworth they redefine the notion of “standard orchestral repertoire.”

Yes, they’ll happily tear into a surging Rachmaninov piano concerto and cast a glow over Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but they’ll also illuminate music by neglected British composers like Ernest Moeran and York Bowen.

At the 2010 Proms alone they ran the gamut from Bizet to Wagner via Stephen Sondheim’s eightieth birthday concert starring Bryn Terfel and Judi Dench.

TV viewers may not recognize their name, but they’ll be familiar with the orchestra’s playing on the soundtrack of innumerable BBC programmes from nature series to election broadcasts.

Thousands of radio listeners love Discovering Music with them on BBC Radio 3 and for 58 years, audiences have relished them on BBC Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night – the world’s longest running music programme.

One week they’ll tune in for the nostalgic enchantment of Ivor Novello, the next they’ll hear them gigging with Texan singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman.

In other words, the BBC Concert Orchestra doesn’t have an audience… it has audiences, plural.

For more information about the BBC Concert Orchestra, including an up to date concert diary and features on recordings and other work it is doing, please visit the BBC Concert Orchestra's website.