The Madrid Symphony Orchestra, upon reaching its first 25 years, prepared a series of commemorative events and a publication that compiled the news and main activities of that quarter century of existence. There was also, of course, a great celebration concert that took place at the Teatro de la Zarzuela on April 18, 1928 (it should be remembered that since 1925 the natural home of the OSM, the Teatro Real, was closed for construction). Maestro Enrique Fernández Arbós, principal conductor of the orchestra since 1905, conducted with a first part dedicated to Spanish music: La procesión del Rocío by Turina, Intermezzo from Goyescas by Granados, Navarra by Albéniz and El sombrero de tres picos by Falla. In the second part, the great cellist Pablo Casals was the soloist in Haydn's Concerto in C major. And the concert closed with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll.

Casals and Arbós had a great friendship since the conductor, together with Albéniz, discovered the almost child cellist playing in a café in Barcelona's Gracia neighborhood and, between the two, they channeled the beginning of Casals' brilliant career.

In the early days of radio in Spain, between 1924 and 1925 there was a station that quickly stood out and soon became almost hegemonic: Unión Radio. The presence of the young composer Salvador Bacarisse (27 years old) as artistic director of the station left its mark from the first moment: music was from the beginning a backbone of the programming of this new means of communication. And the relationship with the OSM was very intense. The so-called Station Quintet, which gave almost daily live concerts from the station, was formed by Julio Francés, Odón González, Conrado del Campo, Juan Ruiz Casaux and José María Franco, all musicians from the orchestra. In 1928 Unión Radio launched an ambitious plan to incorporate live symphonic concerts, initially broadcast from the Teatro Alkázar and later from the station's own studios, in a clear challenge to the physical capacity of the venue, as the images show us studios packed with musicians, instruments, music stands and microphones. Those first symphonic concerts inaugurated two aspects that today seem commonplace to us; first they were broadcast in a chain, not only for Madrid, as the stations of Barcelona, Seville, Salamanca and San Sebastián were connected. And they were the first concerts sponsored by a commercial brand: Metal Concerts of the General Spanish Electricity Company.

The Philharmonic Society of La Coruña was one of the first to request Fernández Arbós and the OSM to organize concert tours to bring symphonic music to their city, where, as in almost all of Spain, there was no orchestral ensemble. The project matured and could be carried out from 1909, when the Symphony made its first tour: Arbós and 75 musicians giving concerts for a month in Zaragoza, Logroño, Bilbao, Santander, Gijón, Oviedo, Lugo, La Coruña, Vigo and Valladolid.

After that first experience, the orchestra's visits to La Coruña were repeated annually, during the spring months, until 1936. The concerts were always held at the Teatro Rosalía de Castro, always with full capacity and with enormous critical and public success. The arrival of the Symphony to La Coruña was an event that exceeded the artistic dimension of a simple concert. Arbós and the orchestra reciprocated by premiering works by Galician composers there, such as Baudot, and, above all, making known the best of the orchestral repertoire and the main novelties of Spanish authors that had just been premiered in Madrid.

The city council of La Coruña recognized the special relationship that had been established with Enrique Fernández Arbós by naming him Adopted Son of the city in 1934, an act that was held in the Full Council Hall of the City Hall and attended by the entire orchestra.

Enrique Fernández Arbós had enormous prestige as a violinist and violin teacher. In Madrid, from a very young age, he was Professor of Violin at the Royal Conservatory and in London he was a professor at the Royal College of Music directed by George Grove, who hired Arbós despite a funny first interview in which Grove spoke English and didn't understand French and Arbós spoke French and didn't understand English. Arbós' teacher, the great violinist Josep Joachim, then had to go to resolve the misunderstanding.

Arbós in his teaching work in London came into contact with many generations of top-level young violinists and with many of them, not only his students, he later collaborated in his activity as a conductor. The prodigious and precocious British violinist, although born in the United States, Yehudi Menuhin visited Madrid in 1935 to perform concerts as a soloist at the Teatro Calderón and at the reception offered to him at the Hotel Ritz, the most prominent personalities of Spanish music attended: of course Maestro Arbós, who knew Menuhin from his concerts in London and the United States and, as seen in the photograph, the also conductor José María Franco Bordons, student, collaborator and, to a certain extent, successor of Arbós.

The 1940s and 1950s were not the brightest in the history of the OSM and, however, the enormous effort with which it managed to overcome all difficulties and move forward to reach our days is very remarkable. In the post-war period, the OSM found itself without a principal conductor, due to the death of Arbós, and with its ranks decimated by the creation of the National Orchestra that recruited the best instrumentalists from the other Madrid orchestras. The OSM reacted with its enormously popular concerts at the Teatro Monumental and with the presentation of a good number of conductors who would later become famous for different reasons. Some for their extreme youth, almost children, like Francesco Mander or Pierino Gamba, others for the deep artistic mark they later left like Igor Markevich, whose first concerts in Madrid were with the OSM. All the Spanish conductors of that time also took the podium of the Symphony, like a young Ataulfo Argenta who was already the second conductor of the National Orchestra with Pérez Casas.

One of the problems that the OSM had to solve in that period was finding a rehearsal room, a problem common to the rest of the Madrid symphonic ensembles, and they resolved it with an agreement with the Press Association that left them, in the morning hours, the large entrance hall to the ballroom. Large as a vestibule yes, but insufficient as a rehearsal room and with very limited acoustic conditions. But even so, the concerts were carried out.