The Los Angeles Philharmonic first played at the Hollywood Bowl at an Easter Sunrise Service in 1921 and inaugurated the first official Hollywood Bowl season, called "Symphonies Under the Stars," in July of 1922. The Hollywood Bowl has been the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic ever since.

• Video: Archival Footage 1932–1958
• Video: Great Artists of Symphonic Music & Opera

The Los Angeles Philharmonic was founded in 1919 by William Andrews Clark, Jr. The Philharmonic has risen to international prominence under the guidance of ten distinguished musical directors, the most recent of whom is Gustavo Dudamel. Virtually every classical soloist and conductor has appeared at the Hollywood Bowl. Violinist Jascha Heifetz made his debut at the Bowl in 1931, conductor Zubin Mehta in 1961, and Gustavo Dudamel made his U.S. debut at the Bowl in 2005.

Among the highlights of symphonic music at the Bowl are Sergei Rachmaninoff performing his own Piano Concerto No. 2 (1942), the West Coast premiere of Mahler's monumental Symphony No. 8 conducted by Eugene Ormandy (1948), and a celebration of Stravinsky's 80th birthday (1962).

I remember sitting in a light drizzle on one Friday evening in one of the seats in the very front rows, where the boxes are now, when Bruno Walter conducted… Nobody moved in that drizzle; we were all entranced…

— Sylvia Tansey, audience member

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, established in 1991, is a completely separate orchestra. Under its founding conductor, John Mauceri, the orchestra performed well over 200 concerts at the Bowl and made a number of best-selling CDs. There were earlier incarnations of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, under slightly different names such as Hollywood Bowl Symphony, that were also featured on many LP recordings in the 1950s and 60s, and for two years in the mid-1940s the orchestra was led by the renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski.

The very first opera presented at the Bowl was a production of Carmen in 1922. Proceeds from the opera paid for the benches in the brand-new amphitheater. Among the opera highlights of the Bowl's early days is a 1938 production Wagner's Die Walküre, starring Maria Jeritza as Brünnhilde. It was an incredibly lavish production featuring dazzling lighting effects, genuine fire and smoke, and costumed Valkyries riding white horses down the hillsides during the famous Act III opening "Ride of the Valkyries." In 1946 French coloratura Lily Pons set the attendance record for the Hollywood Bowl with 26,410 tickets sold for a single concert. The record will never be broken because the capacity of the Bowl has been reduced over the years and fire regulations prevent people from sitting in the aisles and on the hillsides. Many famous opera stars have made their Hollywood Bowl debut from superstar coloratura Amelita Galli-Curci in 1924 to Renée Fleming in 2004. Since the mid-nineties, the Bowl has presented a full-length opera in concert format nearly every year, with such favorites as Madame Butterfly (2000), La Traviata (2003), Turandot (2004), Porgy & Bess (2009), and Carmen (2010).