Orchestras and their sound

You can tell an old hand by one's ability to recognize the particular sound – of an orchestra, of a pianist, of a violinist. The task is easier whith singers. Even the most inexperienced opera lover can tell Pavarotti from Carreras and Bruson from Bastiannini (though it is not exactly that simple with ladies from a certain register upwards). But who can tell today the Oslo Philharmonic from the Philharmonia? Or the Saarbruecken RSO from the Rotterdam Philharmonic? Very few indeed. And this hard test has become even harder by the homogenization of orchestral sound around the world. Could any of you tell the New Zealand SO from the Royal Scottish SO in the Tintner Bruckner cycle (NAXOS) – except that New Zealanders sounded more at ease with the idiom than the Scottish?

It was not at all like this a few decades back. Telling the NBC SO from the PSO of New York was relatively essential for collectors with a decent amount of LPs on their shelves, as it was to tell the Berliner Philharmoniker from the Concertgebouw or from the Czech PO. Each of the known orchestras of the world, big and small, famous and obscure, first, second or third class, had their own sound. (Much younger I could immediately tell – in medias res, as it were – that the Athens State Orchestra were playing, from the different tuning among instrument families – but that was more like… cheating.) The Chicago had its own unmistakable sound; so did the Cleveland and Boston, so did Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh (and had Indianapolis been as lucky to have signed a good fat contract with some of the major producers, they too would have been easily recognizable). In Europe it was impossible to take the VPO for the BPO or the Paris Conservatoire for Lamoureux, the Gewandhaus for the Saechsische Staatskapelle (later Dresden State Orchestra), the Vienna SO for the London Symphony and the Philharmonia for the Royal Philharmonic. Well… try to tell any of these today. Chances are you are in for some major blunders.

So what’s happened to orchestras worldwide? Is it the stereo that has corrupted our listening tastes or is it merely the absence of great conductors that caused the expansion of such homogenous sound like a pandemic? I think both, but mostly the second. You see orchestras do have their own sound – very much the combination of the musicians that form them and the characteristics of the hall they play in – but great conductors too had their own sound and this was imposed over that other composite subtotal and produced the unmistakable sound total of each orchestra, either live in their hall or recorded at location. But Toscanini sounded the same conducting his NBC or the RSO of N.Y. or at La Scala in Milan. And Munch produced in Paris the same sound he produced on the podium of New York or later Boston – as Reiner did in Pittsburgh and Chicago, Mitropoulos in New York, at the Metro or in Vienna, as Stokowski did in Philadelphia or in New York or any other orchestra he conducted. I even heard him in Athens with our horror of an orchestra during the early 60s and didn’t believe my ears. It was little short than if the Philadelphians were playing. And so on and so forth. Of course an essential element was that conductors stayed for years in their posts and rarely flew to other cities or even continents there to conduct their “second orchestra”.

So those were the symbiotic times of orchestras, halls and conductors, and the outcome of this synergy can be heard today on their reissued recordings that corner such a big part of the market today, even the big names have noticed. DG Originals, SONY Legacy, Testament, various Philips back editions (and of course Naxos and a score of lesser producers) have made once more money from the great musical tradition of the “radio times”. This cohesive bond between orchestras and their leaders (not the American sense of leader, but true leaders of orchestras) seems to be one of the basic reasons a vast part of the record buying public has turned to “historic” recordings (the term used nowadays for recordings spanning from at least the 30s to the late 60s). In a sense they were really historic: the sense of past perfect…