The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra going through the motions of Wagner’s “Liebestod” – “diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”
To access a pertinent podcast conversation between Joseph Horowitz and conductor Kenneth Woods, click here. To discover a final whiff of optimism, go to 1:00:53.
An accelerating hiatus between Europe and the United States, especially obvious to Americans (such as myself) recently abroad, touches on aspects of daily life, of governance, and – not least – of civilization.
For instance: though it’s not yet widely noticed (except privately), there’s a growing gap between the top European orchestras and the big-name American orchestras — and it’s symptomatic of bigger things. Perhaps this will prove a reckoning moment for classical music in the United States, documenting a cumulative failure to absorb the European parent culture and, moving on, to grow New World roots.
If so, it’s a failure that was long deferred and disguised by stellar immigrant conductors and instrumentalists — who today, however, are barely a memory. When I wrote Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Created a New Audience for Old Music in 1987, it was pilloried for falsely forecasting a classical music crisis particular to the United States. My premise was that the high-pitched celebrity of an Italian symphonic conductor signified a “culture of performance” seduced by foreign glamour and sidelining the creative act. In today’s US, the Toscanini loyalists are by now long gone, music critics are gone, audiences are gone or newly clueless. Our composers increasingly confect makeshift music. I predicted it would happen – but never imagined it would transpire so quickly.
Back in 1927, Charles Edward Russell – a popular socialist writer – called America’s orchestras our “foremost cultural asset,” a “sign of honor among the nations.” It was a credible claim. The concert orchestra was largely a New World invention, versus pit orchestras abroad. And we had some great ones. Just listen to broadcasts of the symphony orchestras of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and of the Met orchestra, during the thirties and forties.
Curiously – revealingly – they’re a heterogeneous group. They don’t share a common “American” style. Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony boasted an exceptionally robust string choir. Many of those players, including the concertmaster, were Russian. The winds were French. Koussevitzky was himself a Russian string player (a double bass virtuoso) who arrived in the US by way of Paris. What did they sound like? Koussevitzky was a Tchaikovsky specialist. Try this torrid 1943 broadcast of Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini.
The New York Philharmonic was more Italianate, at least when Arturo Toscanini was on the podium. Its signature was a scorching combination of precision and song. Here is the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide.
Downtown at the Met, the orchestra was even more Italianate, with more Italian members (impossible to count because the Met’s archivists now store previously accessible records where they’re not “retrievable”). As I’ve often written, under Ettore Panizza’s baton this group was a powderkeg. Its whipsaw attacks, lean sonorities, and taut melodic filaments manifest a Verdi style. That in Wagner, under Artur Bodanzky, the same style proved unidiomatic but thrilling demonstrates how tradition deeply seated in performance can be liberating rather than confining. I once shared with my late friend Alexander Toradze Bodanzky’s January 30, 1937, Siegfried broadcast (the mightiest rendering of that opera that I know). We sampled the mountaintop passage leading to Brunnhilde’s awakening, then the beginning of the duet. Many treasure this performance because the singers are Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Lexo’s incredulous response was: “What an orchestra!” And so it was.
(More than those of any American concert pianist I can think of, Lexo’s interpretations – of Ravel, of Prokofiev, of Shostakovich, of Stravinsky, of Rachmaninoff – were inflected by the rhythmic energies of American jazz, which he had zealously absorbed via the Voice of America “Jazz Hour.”)
Stokowski’s band in Philadelphia was sui generis. They emitted a sonic lava flow, sans subito dynamics. Even staccatos were viewed with suspicion. This is the orchestra Rachmaninoff called “the greatest the world has ever known.” My favorite Stokowski/Philadelphia performance is of Beethoven’s Fifth, as experimentally recorded (with remarkable dynamic range) by Bell Labs in 1931. The misterioso passages of the Andante, reconceived by Stokowski as an Adagio, attain an hypnotic poetic stasis. And listen to his cellos sigh the opening tune.
The only thing these four orchestras had in common was a caliber of engagement rarely encountered nowadays. The players were closer in time and disposition to the repertoire at hand. They “feel it.” Today, that link’s been severed.
Recently, I felt impelled to return to the most astonishing symphonic ensemble I ever encountered in live performance. This was Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic, on tour in the US (for the only time) in 1962. I was fourteen years old and listened in a state of shock. Thanks to the Iron Curtain, Mravinsky and his players inhabited a time warp. For half a century, beginning in 1938, his prerogatives were absolute. Rehearsals and performances observed a sacred calling. The lineage back to Tchaikovsky remained intact. For new music, they had Shostakovich’s symphonies. In Tchaikovsky’s Fifth (which I heard), the vibrating horns and piercing trumpets and (most of all) the bewitching string choir, with its vast range of nuance and dynamics, revealed to my ears the true sound of Tchaikovsky. And yet this specificity of style and sound was empowering, not constricting. You can now hear Mravinsky in a wide swath of repertoire, recorded in concert. His affinities are actually Germanic. His Beethoven and Bruckner seem to me incomparable. The trombone vibrato is an acquired taste.
American orchestras, in comparison, have never enjoyed a stylistic base linked to native repertoire because there is no adequate American canon. Might there have been? Two possible progenitors were our two supreme concert composers: Charles Ives and George Gershwin. But Ives exerted no influence during the decades he was composing, and Gershwin was sidelined as an interloper from the tainted precincts of Broadway and jazz – the very influences that might have fostered a distinctive New World swagger (at times detectable in various Leonard Bernstein interpretations).
I’ve often written that the biggest “what-iff” in the history of American classical music is: What if Gershwin had lived as long as Aaron Copland? Responding to my recent blogs, the composer David Chesky writes: “Gershwin reflected the syncopation, rhythm, optimism, and energy of American life. His orchestral work captured the sound of a nation coming into its own. Our cities pulse with jazz, hip-hop, Latin music, rock electronic music, and countless hybrid forms. If America is going to have a living classical tradition, it must absorb those rhythms and that vitality. . . . If American classical music had been allowed to develop naturally, it might have continue the lineage of Gershwin – with richer harmonies, greater complexity, and new orchestral colors.”
In retrospect, what’s “American” in common for Ives or Gershwin or Stokowski is a self-made insouciance, discarding or mangling Old World tradition. In my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, I made the same claims for Jon Vickers and Glenn Gould – the signature North American opera singer and pianist, whose performances of Old World classics were never idiomatic. Of Vickers I wrote:
“The most original Met artist during the [Rudolf] Bing and [James] Levine years was the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers. In an era when other singers worked to recapture the fleeting essence of styles Italian, French, German, or Russian, Vickers eschewed every pretext of stylistic authenticity; like the great singers of the Met’s Golden Age and before, he was always the same. For Fernando De Lucia in the 1920s, performing “nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan!” in Italian, Lohengrin was quite simply an Italian role, as enthrallingly and sinuously lyric as Puccini’s Rodolfo. As a Canadian, Vickers had no such recourse: like the comparable New World originals Stokowski, Gould, and the later Bernstein, he was sui generis, one of a kind. None of his signature roles – not Beethoven’s Florestan, sung in German; not Berlioz’s Enee, sing in French, not Leoncavallo’s Canio, sung in Italian, not Tchaikovsky’s Hermann, sung in Russian was idiomatic as he sang it. In fact, closer contact with a Giovanni Martinelli or Peter Pears could only have diluted his Otello or Peter Grimes – not because he was the greater artist, but because his artistry was whole, and wholly iconoclastic. One foundation for Vickers’ singular vocal personality is obvious: unlike most other North Americans of his generation, he had extensive experience singing . . . in his mother tongue. A specialist in outcasts – Tristan and Siegmund were also among his roles – he was himself an operatic pariah.” (I once attempted a pertinent phone conversation with Jon Vickers; it proved untenable.)
Back to orchestras – today’s best, many would say, is the Berlin Philharmonic. Two seasons ago, at Carnegie Hall, Kyrill Petrenko took them through Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead. The sustained fortissimo string tremolos crowning that performance were the most explosive I have ever heard. This past season, the Chicago Symphony came to Carnegie with Klaus Makela. The windswept landscape of “Lemminkainen in Tuonela,” the third of Sibelius’s four Lemminkainen Legends, is a cruel study in tremolo: you feel it or you don’t. What I think I observe among the young Chicago violinists – and those of the New York Philharmonic, of the Met orchestra, of the Boston Symphony — is diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.
The Berlin players retain a dark sonic signature going back at least as far as their fabled decades under Wilhelm Furtwangler. To the south, the Vienna Philharmonic can still play a waltz, can still summon a special sweetness in Strauss (either one) and Mozart (I just heard them in their Staatsoper pit in The Magic Flute). And I recently encountered (at the Mahler festival in Steinbach) the Wiener Theatermusiker, whose mastery of the waltz idiom is enduringly divine.
Bettina Gradinger, who leads the Theatermusiker with deft virtuosity, is concertmistress of the Vienna Volksoper. How I wish I had heard her narrate the zany foibles of the composer’s wife when Chicago assayed Ein Heldenleben at Carnegie. The dour acrobatic violin solos of movement three (“The Hero’s Companion”) deserve to be as inimitable as Pauline Strauss herself. The Theatermusiker program I heard in Steinbach also organically incorporated some hilarious jazz riffs. (European classical musicians have long been more receptive to jazz – and, during the interwar decades, to George Gershwin — than the Americans. This is the “jazz threat” and “Gershwin threat” I discover in Classical Music in America.)
In correspondence with Tscho Theissing, the former Volksoper violinist who masterminds the Theatermusiker, I discovered kindred concerns about an emergent “international style” penalizing string players in particular. He writes: “Many young string players who enter Viennese orchestras have no or very little idea about our style, as it seems not to be taught at the universities (where of course there are many professors from all over the world), and there is a lack of conductors who are capable and/or willing to work on these topics – or they are willing but do not get the opportunity.”
I asked in a recent New York Times piece: “At 250, Has America Delivered on its Classical Music Promise?” When it was picked up by Norman Lebrecht’s slippedisc, the headline read: “Will America Have Orchestras in 2076?” Norman continued: “Classical music [in the US] is now in retreat on most fronts. Apart from raging Dudophilia in Los Angeles and New York, there are few manifestations of classical music as a limelight of American civilisation. Classical music has been eradicated from public education. Historic orchestras in Boston and Pittsburgh are playing half-empty. African-American musicians in orchestras are few and far between. Ensembles are sustained by an influx of US-trained Chinese and Koreans. Europe’s leading maestros (Finns apart) show little interest in becoming music directors in America. The public seems resistant to energetic efforts to diversify the performing repertoire. There are few causes for optimism.”
I wrote to Norman for the names of “leading maestros” with “little interest” in the US. He replied: “Kirill Petrenko, Rattle, Chailly, Gatti, Simone Young, Thielemann, Guggeis, Pappano, Lahav Shani, Bychkov, Popelka, Jakub Hrusa, Marie Jacquot, Lorenzo Viotti, Tomáš Netopil, Philippe Jordan, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Kazuki Yamada, Ivan Fischer, Adam Fischer, Robin Ticciati.” While I’m not sure what to make of this list, I can report that when Daniele Gatti conducted Parsifal in New York in 2013, the Met orchestra for once sounded like a great orchestra. I’ve written about that, also about Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra.
If we are in fact broaching a reckoning moment, if the chickens are in fact flocking home to roost within America’s top symphonic ensembles, what to do? Performance history is actually susceptible to study. There is a Verdi style, documented on recordings by Toscanini and Panizza, among many others. American conservatories could systematically expose budding violinists and trumpeters to jazz. Then there are the Central European dance genres that permeate the symphonies of Dvorak, Bruckner, and Mahler — they, too, can be shared. As for the Viennese waltz style documented on recordings by the likes of Franz Lehar — it can’t be that hard to learn to kick the second beat. Writing about the eminent New York chamber orchestra accompanying Jonas Kaufmann at Carnegie Hall in 2018, I reported:
“Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the [Orchestra of St. Luke’s] treatment of Lehar’s divine Ballsirenen from The Merry Widow; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening’s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in ‘Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss’ via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number. My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred ‘the Budapest postal workers’ orchestra.’”
I happen to know a former Metropolitan Opera violinist. He was in the pit for many performances ineffectively led by Valery Gergiev. I once asked him: “Have you ever heard Gergiev conduct his own Mariinski Orchestra? They play in New York all the time.” He had not. So he did — and it proved instructive. So would be Ettore Panizza’s 1938 Otello.
A pipedream.
To read a sequel blog, click here.
Too bad you did not mention the Digital Concert Hall of the Berlin Philharmonic. For about $175 a year one can hear and see in the best sound and state of the art camera work about 900 performances of the past 15 years from the Berlin Philharmonic and their bevy of great conductors. Musician interviews, documentaries and much more. Every night I can experience symphonic heaven.
And they just added an audio streaming section, too. I’m hopeful this will be expanded with historical performances, in time.
I’ve subscribed to the Berliners digital hall for years and happy to be back in Pittsburgh for the amazing PSO
I’ve been a subscriber to the Berlin Philharmonic digital concert hall for 4 consecutive seasons. I listen to their concerts, both live and recorded with Bose headphones. This motivated me to follow them on tour and after hearing them perform the Bruckner 5 in Symphony Hall in Boston, Nov 2024. All I can say it was a religious experience to put it mildly. The string sound in particular is delightfully warm and memorable. You will never regret paying $175 for a season pass.
From a prominent American music educator:
I can tell you that in my training as a string player in the 80s and 90s, the biggest compliment one could give or get was “that’s so clean!” Everyone listened to and wanted to sound like an engineered commercial recording. It only got worse. I think today’s string player accuracy–as playing machines, instrument operators–is without comparison in the history of music; clean and absolutely faithful to every detail of the score edition in front of them. (I was once thrown out of a lesson for trilling at a cadence in a Handel sonata. Not before my teacher scolded, “Great! now you are Handel!” He always demanded “absolute fidelity” to the score.) No surprise that the current generation is incapable of lilting the second beat of a waltz. It goes against their training. Fidelity to the written score has been drilled into every fiber of their being (that is not distracted by social media). The faster and cleaner the better. The score is not regarded as a guide but a dictator of the composers presumed intentions. (Never mind that many scores are far removed from the composer, surviving only in copyists hands and musicologists’ best guesses.)
This is a very interesting topic. I understand what Mr Horowitz is saying because I listen to lots of historical live performances and today we very rarely hear the kind of seat of the pants excitement that was generated by conductors and orchestras of the past. I certainly appreciate precise string playing, especially, for example, in exposed passages in Mahler Symphonies, but I would much rather be on the edge of my seat if it involves some less than precise intonation. The YNS run through on YT reflects my experience of hearing the actual performance, it was passionless though Davidsen sounded amazing. Listen to Bohm. He knows what sex is about.
But I maintain (in fact I insist) that the decline that Mr Horowitz describes is the fault of the conductors not the supposedly unmotivated players. I grew up in the UK and there is no more cynical bunch than London orchestral musos. Like most players they tend to think they can conduct better than the man or woman before them. Many play familiar pieces from memory without turning past page 1 (I’ve seen that behind the trombones in Enigma Variations), they don’t want their time wasted by “talky” conductors, would like to go to the pub early if possible and they love it when rehearsals end early. But the New Philharmonia became a completely different orchestra when Muti turned up in 1973. He was exciting. Svetlanov was exciting. Tennstedt was demonic in Mahler. The orchestras played out of their skins for these men.
I once met a man at Carnegie Hall and we started talking about Munch, who I never heard live and who wasn’t that big on rehearsing. I have many tapes of his live concerts. The man summarized his experience in the concert hall with Munch as follows “you felt as if it could all fall apart at any moment – and yet it never did.”
For a glimpse of Stokowski still in his pomp let me recommend the video on YT of his conducting of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1958 (fortunately the tapes were kept!). He conducts El Amor Brujo and the Prelude and Liebestod. The orchestra must have been playing the Falla for the first time. The whole thing is quite extraordinary and very exciting. Stoki knew how the Liebestod should go……….
I have to agree that today’s American orchestral musicians ( strings, primarily) lack engagement and involvement. This has been cultivated to a great degree because of the wrong-headed notion that movement in one’s playing is a distraction to one’s colleagues, and that it is for the conductor alone to provide “the dance”.
The Berliners would scoff at that.
What they don’t understand is that a withholding of a show of involvement too often translates to actual non-involvement and manifests itself in the sound and energy produced.
The top American orchestras feel that their “phone-it-in” level of play is quite good enough for the job. They are right about that to some extent. But it is the “edge of the seat” quality in the performance that is rarely reached.
Yes, the “good enough” level is higher than it’s ever been. But if colleagues are “teaching” the new hires that “this moving thing is just not what we do here”, then the enthusiasm they had upon entry gets quashed quite rapidly.
The BSO has been like this for decades. The string players have effectively worked this (obvious to the audience) physical withholding of engagement into their performing ethos. I fought this, myself, from my corner of the string section. I didn’t believe in it.
Audiences listen with their eyes perhaps as much as with their ears, and now maybe moreso in this era of visual overload.
I once had a visiting conductor stop me as I was exiting the stage after a rehearsal to tell me that he appreciated my contribution to the music making and that he looked to me (specifically) quite often for reinforcement amongst the sea of tepid responses.
It was the sole acknowledgement of my work in a 35 year career.
I have often thought that the first American orchestra to shed the shroud and Berlin-ize itself will have audiences flocking there.
I am an orchestra musician in my 70’s but still working. I often feel like the last railroad lookout in the caboose…obsolete and irrelevant. It’s a long trend and Covid was the finishing blow.
Thank you for your service. I’m in my fifties and have felt like it’s a lost cause for a few decades now.
None of these distinguished commentaries seem to have taken into account the huge migration of musicians conductors and composers to America before during and after the second world War… And no one mentions Minimalism..
Orchestras are simply in between the wall and a hard rock all over the world. I can’t even believe there are still so many music school students trying and dreaming of making it in classical music ( however it may be defined ). The repertoire is pretty much stagnant and with the best recordings and performances in my memory that I can replay any time, I wouldn’t be easily persuaded by anyone to go listen to just another conductor with just any orchestra playing workhorses like Beethoven symphonies. A second rate performance will ruin my memory forever. Makela taking over two of the world’s best orchestras at the same time at age 30? Absolute insanity!
Back in the day, legendary orchestral musicians would have laughed Makela off the stage. This is going back many decades, but one of those legends told me that he didn’t even understand why Seiji Ozawa was around. We had so many giants back in the day. Now we have “robots,” poster boys/girls, and DEI (didn’t earn it).
When I was younger I soon discovered the difference between American and European orchestras as I was listening to comments from members of a major European orchestra (not the Berlin but an orchestra that I prefer over it). A group of string players (violinists even!) were discussing in a very positive and enthusiastic way their performance that evening. The comments were about how well the orchestra played and complimentary on their colleagues contribution to the effort. There might have been suggestions (NOT criticisms) on what could have been done differently but said in sincere interest of making the music better. In American orchestras (this is a gross generalization) what is said by many of the members is often despairingly said about other colleagues, the conductor or the job itself.
STYLE – it seems that in this country it is rarely taught! I once was doing a complete performance of the Vivaldi Seasons with a very up and coming violinist with New York management. The discussion of the difference in approach to Vivaldi versus Mozart or Beethoven came up. There wasn’t any reaction from the soloist so I asked what her prominent teacher had told her. The answer was that it had never been mentioned. Once in a conducting workshop the student was doing a Mendelssohn work and treating it as if it was Beethoven. I asked the student if there was any difference between a forte in different composer’s works. The answer was a forte is a forte. I was fortunate to have a teacher that not only discussed the conceptual differences between Bach and Debussy but gave me the technique utilized in the production of those different sounds. With those concepts I was able, after studying and observing conductors whose techniques fit different styles, to be flexible enough to utilize those different techniques to produce those different sounds from orchestras. I am thankful for that first teacher that wouldn’t allow me to play unless I understood what environmental effects brought about the music that those composers wrote.
What about the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra? Making waves in the Mid-West. Incredible growth through the years. Creative programming, growing audiences and superb leadership musically and organizationaly as well.
A lot of American orchestras are in transition right now.
Philly and Cleveland are not. Article didn’t mention them maybe because it doesn’t fit his thesis. Philly plays every concert like it’s their last. Their Mahler absolutely kicks butt. And I hear Cleveland is as wonderful as ever right now.
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” There is always such grousing. I was at the Mahler Festival 2025. I don’t remember the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra strings swaying to Mahler’s 9th or Das Lied von der Erde. The Chicago Symphony played the 6th and 7th. From the response of the Amsterdam audience, I dont think there was disappointment. Unless the thesis is that the Amsterdam audience doesn’t know Mahler.
I started to listen to the podcast with Kenneth Woods and our author. I was also at the Colorado Mahlerfest 2026. Would Ken say that he wouldn’t take the CSO string section to perform the Mahler 9th in that final Adagio because they have a corporate sound produced by too many immigrants from China and Korea?
Orchestra’s still retain a sound tradition. The new principal trombone for the CSO in a recent public discussion detailed how a conductor wasn’t specific in his instructions (not Makela) shaping the sound in a Richard Strauss piece. He said the orchrstra just instinctively, as though by reflex, reverted.to their Reiner interpretation.
I do take Mr. Horowitz’s point about style being almost un-notatable. (Or was that Ken’s in the podcast?) The suburban orchestra, for which I serve on the board, has played the Symphonic Dances from Westside Story under our earlier music director who happened to also be a jazz drum-set artist, our subsequent Salzburg-born director, and our present Bulgarian music director. The “mambo” sounded brilliant under the jazz master. But the “Somewhere” was far more touching by the Bulgarian.
Last night I heard American in Paris performed by the Grant Park Orchestra at the Harris Theater. The trumpet in the blues passage is American born, and it was the most tepid rendition I have ever heard. The conductor was Black. I far preferred the CSO’s Spanish trumpeter in this music conducted by the Finn.
OK. Simon Rattle, who is one day away of being my birth twin, may not want an American music directorship. But I’m guessing that 90% of the younger conductors on that list would give their eye teeth to get a postion with a top-ten American Orchestra. Seemingly, Barenboim and Thielemann were hoping that the latter”s performance with the CSO of the Bruckner 8th would earn him that position. (I would be careful of citing Slipped Disc.)
Finally, I can’t remember Ken’s point about Frank Miller (who was also Tocanini’s cellist) leading that section for the CSO. He was irreplaceable. But Teng Li now leads the viola section. She is the most expressive violist on the planet with her body-movement cues and leads her section reminiscent of Miller. I’m guessing that she wasn’t born in Narragansett. (Yet when I saw her play in a string quartet, her body was relatively still.)
I would say there is plenty of fine music making out there. We dont have to break out out 78’s to find it.
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Hi Charles – Thanks for the comment (and for your visit to Colorado MahlerFest). I just want to very clearly and unambiguously reject any idea that the country of one’s birth, age, the colour of one’s skin or the native tongue you speak has anything to do with musicality or the ability to absorb, understand and nurture musical traditions. It’s about listening, immersion, practice, developing new ways. of hearing, etc, etc.
Hi Charles – Thanks for the comment (and for your visit to Colorado MahlerFest). I just want to very clearly and unambiguously reject any idea that the country of one’s birth, age, the colour of one’s skin or the native tongue you speak has anything to do with musicality or the ability to absorb, understand and nurture musical traditions. It’s about listening, immersion, practice, developing new ways. of hearing, etc, etc.