No opera on Rhine as theatre is flooded out

Maurice Waite says:

I actually think the choice of language for these different institutions was the best: it would sound unnatural (or possibly condescending, especially with a target readership of classical music aficionados) to write ‘the German Opera on the Rhine’, for example; and few people would replace ‘Dresdner Staatskapelle’ with ‘Dresden State Band’, or ‘Concertgebouw’ with ‘Concert Building’! Conversely, orchestras called ‘die … Philharmoniker’ are better referred to in English as ‘the … Philharmonic (Orchestra)’, as they all were until a few years ago, when the Berlin, for example, started marketing themselves worldwide as the ‘Berliner Philharmoniker’.

‘Philharmoniker’ is problematic in English constructions, being a plural noun in an orchestra’s name and not readily perceived by English-speakers as such, because in English most orchestras are named as singular entities (used with either a singular or a plural verb), whereas ‘Philharmoniker’ denotes a number of individuals. (There are a very few British orchestras with plural names, such the English Baroque Soloists.)

Equally, ‘Philharmoniker’ is nearly always qualified by an invariable adjective denoting the town where the orchestra is based—Duisburger, Berliner, Wiener, Münchner, etc., some of which will sound unnatural or even be incomprehensible when used in English.

This may be my view only because I am a native English speaker with ability in German; and the following quotation from Deutsche Grammophon’s history of the Berlin Phil may sound perfectly natural to someone with no knowledge of German: “The following April the Berliner Philharmoniker chooses as its artistic director the man who […]”, so I would be interested in any other comments.