The other day the up-and-coming Chinese pianist Lang Lang was excitedly going down the list of America's so-called Big Five orchestras that he'd played with. For him, it was positive proof that his career was arriving. And he was right. Many intelligent classical-music pundits over the years have declared that the term, and the idea behind it, have become irrelevant in the face of so many other artistically distinguished orchestras in the U.S. One could easily agree with that. But the Big Five - the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Philadelphia Orchestra - are still the brand names in American classical music in ways that the St. Louis Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic are not. Whether or not they deserve this status is beside the point.
Consider, for starters, the view from abroad. No matter how badly the Boston Symphony Orchestra has or hasn't played during its last several visits to Carnegie Hall, the Cologne Philharmonie no doubt paid far more than it would have paid for, say, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to make sure that Seiji Ozawa and Company rounded out last summer's festival of America's Big Five. Yes, the term "Big Five" is a marketing tool, one that's particularly self-perpetuating in Europe. Touring expenses require hefty sponsorship; for many American corporations, there couldn't be a classier way to further their business interests abroad. (This is why the Big Five don't make extended, regular tours of the U.S.) Thus, foreign audiences hear our Big Five more often - and not on their bad days, but in well-rehearsed tour programs within a concentrated performing situation. And that could easily summon the players' muscle memory of the glory days, even if they haven't had any such days lately. Is it any wonder that the man on the street in Vienna gets starry-eyed at the mention of the Philadelphia Orchestra, even though one such specimen I encountered called it the Philadelphia Symphony and thought Eugene Ormandy was still alive?
Recordings have much to do with that kind of mystique: they have a much longer reissue life than anyone had previously imagined, even if none of the Big Five are doing much recording at the moment. They've priced themselves out of that market, too. Not that labels don't want them. But the Philadelphia Orchestra, for one, is too proud to capitulate to the now-common practice of underwriting recordings - or to do a flat-fee deal with a budget label such as Naxos. (While the Seattle Symphony, for example, has no problem with it, such an arrangement would likely lower the prestige of the Philadelphians' brand name.)
The Big Five have laurels that the others don't, and that counts for a great deal, even in more amorphous artistic matters. Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia are in tip-top shape these days, but even if they weren't - as Chicago and Boston are not - there is the considerable benefit of institutional memory. That's something very different from pride or integrity. It's an unconscious way of doing things. Though not everybody in the New York Philharmonic played under Leonard Bernstein, every member at least plays next to someone who did. Musical osmosis can be subtle and powerful, and can give an ensemble a depth that's easily awakened under the right circumstances. Though the glib reason for the Philadelphia Orchestra's lush sound is compensation for the dry acoustics at the Academy of Music, some players say it's more about the kind of pressure they apply with their bows, or the softer attacks used by the brass instruments. Few can or do talk about it, or even think about it. They just pick it up. That's what happens after a particular idea of sound is imposed on an ensemble over 70 years, from the 1912 appointment of Leopold Stokowski to the early 1980s retirement of Eugene Ormandy.
At any particular moment, any number of American orchestras might play consistently better than the Big Five. Many have a lucky happenstance of extraordinary chemistry with an up-and-coming conductor, such as David Zinman in Rochester in the 1970s or Semyon Bychkov in Buffalo during the 1980s, or a great but temporarily compromised conductor, such as Sir Thomas Beecham sitting out World War II in Seattle or Otto Klemperer wrestling with mental illness in Los Angeles. In many of these cases, however, the great man leaves and the orchestra all too readily slips back into provincialism. Some never overcome their provincialism, but merely have isolated moments of excellence that can give an incorrect impression of artistic health.
Consider, as case studies, two occasional candidates for Big Five status, the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Intelligent, sophisticated people have asked me if Baltimore even has an orchestra and simply presume that the nation's capital has a good orchestra. The reality is practically the reverse.
The National Symphony Orchestra was on the way up under that great veteran orchestra builder Antal Dorati, who was dismissed all-too-soon when the recently emigrated Mstislav Rostropovich became available in the mid-1970s. Wisely, the management knew that Rostropovich couldn't build a great orchestra just on his own charisma, so they added string players. The orchestra got better, but Rostropovich proved to be a conductor of extremely limited repertoire (well, he could conduct Mozart, but it was awful) and cultivated a strident string sound that only suited his core repertoire (Prokofiev and Shostakovich). His replacement, Leonard Slatkin, also improved matters - and he possesses the repertoire range Rostropovich lacked. Inexplicably, he hasn't performed the miracle in Washington that he did previously with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Baltimore, meanwhile, may have a shot at Big Five-level prominence. Many years under David Zinman (1983-1990) turned the orchestra into a marvelously versatile ensemble that set new standards in performance of contemporary music and was at the vanguard of historically-informed performance of Beethoven. Now, Yuri Temirkanov (who might have ended up in Philadelphia had he not been going through an unreliable phase in the 1990s) is building on Zinman's achievements with a different repertoire and an interpretive style harkening back to the first half of the 20th century. Temirkanov's standards aren't Zinman's, but the point is that Baltimore has standards, and they've been high for a long time. Add to that Temirkanov's international stature: through tours and recordings, he could be Baltimore's ticket to Big Five standing.
Big Five status - conceptually speaking - is never the work of one conductor, but of a succession of them; that's why these orchestras can survive less congenial chief conductor relationships and come out of artistic hibernation when those conductors leave. Though the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's first period of greatness is generally thought to be the 1950s under Fritz Reiner, recordings show superb music making was going on long before then under Frederick Stock. Reiner's replacement, Jean Martinon, is often thought to have been a failure, at least among the press. That contention is contradicted by the live recordings that have been published in recent years: the concerts they document doubtless helped lay the groundwork for the glory years under Sir Georg Solti. Such a history of artistry can't be undone by any one conductor - not even Daniel Barenboim, whose recent recording of Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4 is, typically, so directionless that the many trademark Chicago Symphony moments from the strings and brass seem more like sonic showoff than anything legitimately musical.
The Boston Symphony had Karl Muck, Serge Koussevitzky and Charles Münch - three of the century's great conductors. If ever there was evidence that their shades still hover over the orchestra after many indifferent years under Ozawa, it's that guest conductors like Simon Rattle make the ensemble sound like new (or, rather, like old). After perhaps the lowest slump of its second 50 years, the New York Philharmonic - with its history of music directors Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein - came back from a Zubin Mehta-induced death rattle within what seemed like minutes after the arrival of Kurt Masur. Nobody should have been surprised. Long before Masur, I remember hearing Zinman rehearse the New York Philharmonic and thinking that even a semi-comatose version of this orchestra still played far better than the Rochester Philharmonic (which Zinman then conducted, magnificently).
In many ways, Big Five status is conferred by fate. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra has been around as long as any great American orchestra. It even had Leopold Stokowski before Philadelphia did. But Philadelphia is where Stokowski came of age artistically - and he took the orchestra with him. Meanwhile, Cincinnati might have made up for lost time in the 1970s with Thomas Schippers. Alas, he died prematurely. His successor, the modernism-oriented Michael Gielen, didn't have a chance for connection with that conservative Midwestern city; since then, Jesus Lopez-Cobos has been merely solid. The Toronto Symphony seemed headed for salad days when it hired the great Czech conductor Karel Ancerl; he died after a few seasons, and while there have been no real failures since then, there have been no real successes either, despite an impressive list of conductors that includes Andrew Davis and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Both the Los Angeles and San Francisco orchestras are enjoying golden periods right now. But what will determine whether they make it into the Big Five zone is who leads them after Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas. Something similar seems to be happening in Birmingham, England: music lovers there are saying that Simon Rattle was only their John the Baptist; the recently-installed Sakari Oramo is, in their view, the Messiah. This may finally be that orchestra's ticket to classical-music immortality.
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© andante Corp. July 2001. All rights reserved.
