"The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra became the first international orchestra to tour the U.S. since February 2020, completing a 14-concert, nine-city U.S. tour at Carnegie Hall."

"After enduring repeated COVID-19 testing and a 5,400-mile (8690-kilometer) flight from London to become the first international symphony to tour the United States in 23 months, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra arrived in California to discover some brass had not...

'...To us it means that everything is possible, in even such difficult circumstances,' [Vasily] Petrenko said.

It had been 708 days since conductor John Eliot Gardiner led the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique in Beethoven’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies at Carnegie, which was shuttered from March 13, 2020, until last Oct. 6. The hall reopened with mostly soloists and smaller ensembles, delaying a steadier schedule of larger-scale performances until 2022.

The Royal Philharmonic traveled with an orchestra manager, tour manager, three stage crew and six assistants, and filled Carnegie’s stage with 104 players. The orchestra began the tour in California — Santa Barbara on Jan. 11, followed by concerts in Palm Desert, Northridge, Costa Mesa and Davis — then to Orlando, Florida, for a residency at the new Steinmetz Hall. The tour concluded with performances in Fairfax, Virginia; New Brunswick, New Jersey, and finally its return to Carnegie Hall for the first time since 1997."