N.Y. TIMES: The Big Five Orchestras No Longer Add Up - by James R. Oestreich It was like clockwork. Someone writing in The New York Times would refer to the Big Five American orchestras: the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. And within hours, Peter Pastreich, the respected executive director of the San Francisco Symphony from 1978 to 1999, would beard The Times’s overseer of classical music — at the time, me — by telephone or e-mail, complaining that the term Big Five had long since outlived whatever usefulness it may once have had. “The notion of the Big Five just doesn’t exist today,” Thomas W. Morris, the chief executive and artistic director of Spring for Music, a festival of North American orchestras at Carnegie Hall, says in a video on the festival’s Web site. The idea of the Big Five was largely created and popularized by journalists, although the member executives started to hold their own meetings. The concept was certified, in a way, by 1969 and 1972 analyses commissioned by, er, the Big Five suggesting that perhaps only the Big Five would survive. Yet, in the words of Deborah Borda, executive director of the New York Philharmonic from 1991 to 1999 and now president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, “the great western migration continues.” She was referring to both geophysical and cultural trends. Ms. Borda’s orchestra — first under Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director, and now under Gustavo Dudamel — is flourishing as never before, artistically as well as financially. Its programming is easily the most adventurous of any major American orchestra. And the San Francisco Symphony continues to thrive under its longtime music director, Michael Tilson Thomas, notwithstanding the bump of a 17-day players’ strike in March that wiped out a scheduled East Coast tour, including two concerts at Carnegie Hall. CLICK LINK FOR ENTIRE ARTICLE! nytimes/2013/06/16/arts/music/the-big-five-orchestras-no-longer-add-up.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 22:20:35 +0000
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