In Friday’s (6/14) New York Times, James Oestreich writes about the phrase “Big Five American orchestras,” which traditionally meant the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. “At least by the mid-1960s, soon after I had started to follow classical music, the term had become common coin in discussions of the American orchestral scene. And it proved remarkably persistent…. The landscape has changed greatly over the last half-century, much as the country’s economic, demographic and cultural landscape has, and in many of the same ways. … ‘There is a natural tendency in any field to want to identify and celebrate the best,’ said Jesse Rosen, president and chief executive of the League of American Orchestras, a service organization, whose annual conference opens Tuesday in St. Louis. ‘The problem is establishing criteria. … Success today is not limited to the quality of execution. The things that represent quality today are much more varied, more democratic, more inclusive.’ ” The article quotes several orchestra executives, including Peter Pastreich, former executive director of the San Francisco Symphony, who “takes issue with the way things are reported in the press. ‘If I dropped in on the United States from Mars and heard, “What a disaster!,” what would I see?’ he asked. ‘Every little town has an orchestra.… This is an amazingly vibrant musical life.’ ”
Posted June 14, 2013
