The orchestra of brotherly love

January 2, 10:36 AMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

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The December 2008 issue of Gramophone featured an article ranking the top twenty of the world's orchestras. Naturally, such critical rankings are hardly authoritative; they're opinions by various folks all rolled into a list of some sort. Personally I don't have the slightest problem in such lists, provided I remind myself to refrain from buying into them.

I noted that U.S. orchestras were very well represented (San Francisco, New York, Boston, LA, Cleveland, Chicago). I also found little to kvetch about concerning the top three (in ascending order: Amsterdam, Berlin, Vienna.)

I might have included Minnesota, ranked the SFO a bit higher, and deferred the Budapest Festival Orchestra until a more long-term track record had been achieved. Still and all, it's a perfectly decent selection.

Two sidebars were of particular interest. The first singled out up-and-coming orchestras, such as the São Paulo. The second listed a few of the greats of the past, those which are either defunct or have fallen from their former lofty perches.

Second on that list (after the legendary NBC Symphony) was...the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Oh, how it breaks the heart. Not just that the Philly was kicked out of a Top 20 list, but that it was so ignominiously banished to a corner footstool, there to sit with a dunce cap on its head. Even if I concluded that the Gramophone editors are tone-deaf nincompoops, the fact remains that the almighty Philly was singled out for censure.

I'm of a particular age (trailing end of the Baby Boomer generation) for whom the Philadelphia Orchestra meant Stokowski and Ormandy, and all those RCA, then Columbia, then RCA-redux records in a flood of lush sonic grandeur. I attended PO concerts during the 1970s, when they were still going gangbusters under Ormandy; I was a student at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory and either the Philly would come South to us, or I could hop on Amtrack and go North to them.

I was especially keen to attend the PO at the Academy of Music given their importance to me on record during my childhood and teen years.

For most of my pre-college days my primary venue for records was the Columbia Record Club. Most of what little money I could scrape together as a kid went into Columbia's coffers. During the 1960s, Bernstein/NY Phil and Ormandy/Philadelphia were the two predominant orchestras on Columbia, followed closely by Szell/Cleveland.

Out of my minuscule budget allowing one, maybe two records a month, I generally picked Philadelphia when selecting an orchestral LP; the Bernstein/NY recordings were sometimes disappointing to me, occasionally harsh or (even to my immature ears) undisciplined.

But the Philadelphia never disappointed. That Rubenesque opulence was to me everything that I loved in an orchestra, and Ormandy's directness and clarity plucked a responsive chord. (Virgil Thomson on Ormandy: no lackadaisical daisy he, and no Holy Roller, either.)

It's worth mentioning that I was hearing the Philly on a little RCA stereo record player, OK for its class (cheap) but nowhere near audiophile grade. An orchestra with a cushioned, full-bodied tone was likely to sound much better on small stereos than, say, a pinpoint-precision outfit like the Cleveland which tended to come off as brittle. I'm aware that nowadays many folks bemoan the audio tinkering that went into the production of that glossy studio sound, but it was definitely advantageous for folks like me back then.

Feeding a burst of happy nostalgia for me are some various re-releases from the Ormandy years.

First up is the Original Jackets Collection: Eugene Ormandy/The Philadelphia Orchestra. Another in the series of those cool Sony/BMG affairs which reproduce the original jacket art of a set of albums, this one gives us 10 CDs from the stereo Columbia years. Sheesh, the memories they bring up.

The Ormandy recording of the Bartók Concerto for Orchestra, recorded in 1963, was my introduction to the work. I almost scraped the grooves off that LP with repeated playings and more or less memorized the liner notes by Herbert Reid. I picked up this re-issue and there it was again:

To most of the audience in Boston's Symphony Hall on December 1, 1944, the first performance of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra was just another doubtful instance of "something contemporary." But by the end of the evening, after a glowing performance under Serge Koussevitsky, perceptive listeners sensed that they had witnessed the emergence of a classic.

Things looked up for me financially for a while with a job bagging groceries at King Soopers. My first paycheck was dumped into the local Target record department, and while I don't remember each of the 3 or 4 LPs I bought, the Ormandy recording of the Tchaikovsky Fifth was among them. That was another one that kept me glued to the stereo for hour after hour.

I still love the jacket art, with its painting of the PO performing at the Academy of Music. (The album to the right is from the Original Jackets series, not the original.)

Eventually I was a member of that audience, but at the time it seemed about a million miles away from suburban Denver.

I had all three of the Rachmaninoff symphonies on LP -- the First and Third had particularly beautiful jacket art -- but although the Second Symphony had a slightly blah cover, it was the one I couldn't get enough of. Happily, it's the one included in the Original Jackets series.

Before I left for college, Ormandy and the Philadelphia had moved back to RCA Victor. This was celebrated with a series of recordings featuring the Academy of Music's central chandelier on the front jacket. They also recorded again with my hero Arthur Rubinstein; a Brahms Second Concerto is another one that emerged with the grooves seriously worn.

But those RCA albums haven't had quite the re-issue power of the Columbia ones. Fortunately, RCA Japan was quite industrious about remastering them, and thanks to the ArkivMusic resurrectionists, they're available as ArkivCDs.

Now, it's a bit shocking to see original jacket art on the front of the CD and Japanese on the back, but no big deal. What's critical is that the recordings are here, maybe not each and every one, but enough to remind me what an astonishing, wonderful orchestra this was -- and still is, dang nab it.

A few favorites among the ones that I've heard lately:

Glière: Symphony No. 3 "Ilya Murometz", recorded October 6, 1971: it's a splashy, Cinemascope-Technicolor kind of affair, given the full-court-press Philadelphia treatment.

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5 plus tone poems including Tapiola: Ormandy was a marvelous Sibelius conductor, and the orchestra certainly had the sonic grandeur to pull this one off. Even though the "swan theme" of the last movement in the horns is a bit subdued compared to some other performances, it's rather like being chauffeured about in a Rolls-Royce.

Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf, with Davie Bowie narrating: I don't know how others might react to this, but I found Bowie to be an inspired choice. He's gentle and sweet, without being condescending. I've never quite been able to warm up to Bernstein's chummy-wummy tone in his rendition with the NY Phil, but I have to admit I also love Peter Ustinov with Karajan in 1957. But more than the narration, I cherish the opportunity to separate out the various sections of the Philly circa 1975. (The narration was overdubbed onto the recording in 1977, by the way.)

Of course there are tons more recordings. Toscanini's recordings with the Philadelphia have been reissued, there are those immortal Rachmaninoff performances (both as pianist and conductor), and a 12-disc Centennial Collection can be obtained from the Philadelphia Orchestra website, or if you prefer, a selection of individual recordings from the Centennial Collection are downloadable as well.

I should also mention that the PO website also offers many recent performances as downloads.

And then there are all those spiffy new recordings from the Ondine label.

In short, the orchestra of brotherly love remains a major presence, no matter what certain review mags might say.