Word: solti
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hosannas. Until his arrival the Chicago, heavy with German tradition, was known as a great orchestra that only rarely gave a great performance. Now it is an ensemble that Solti can (as he did two seasons ago) take into such musical bastions as Vienna, Berlin and Hamburg, and win standing ovations from the public and hosannas from the stuffiest critics. The money for that European tour was raised largely by Symphony Board Chairman Louis Sudler, as part of a campaign to publicize the board's selection of Solti. That choice was made, says Sudler, a Chicago realtor...
Then the money-lack of which had put the orchestra on a disaster alert prior to Solti's arrival-began to come in Annual donations by individuals rose dramatically from $425,919 in 1968 to $1,607,846 last year, corporate contributions from $60,000 in 1966 to $500,000. As a result, the orchestra's endowment fund is now comfortably at a level of $7 million, and last year's deficit was a mere $74,000, lowest since the pre-crisis year of 1963 Last week, the city's music lovers were crammed excitedly into...
...Solti's love for the orchestra, and its for him, is obvious. "It's a marvelous thing to be musically happily married," he says. "I am and I know I'm a romantic type of musician, and this is a romantic orchestra. That is our secret at a time when everybody is doing exactly the opposite, we are unafraid to be romantic...
Romantic for Solti means a predominance of German and Austrian music (ranging all the way from Haydn to Wagner, Mahler and Strauss), plus an orchestral tone that is big and red-blooded but not as luxuriant, say, as the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. As much as he relishes the Sequoia-like majesty of the Chicago's brass section, and its evergreen forest of strings, Solti is equally partial to the meadowed tranquillity of the wood winds. The delicate lyricism he conjures up between oboe and English horn in the pastoral movement of Berlioz's Symphonic Fantastique would...
...Solti is an orchestral architect much in the Toscanini mold. He is not one to pause sentimentally over a favorite melody or chord. The long line is everything. Such basic tools as rhythm and dynamic shading are used to sculpt breathtaking new shapes. His phrasing is at times so tight that it often seems the music is moving more quickly than it actually is. "The things that intrigue me are how to make forms clear," he says, "how to hold a movement together, or if I am conducting opera, how to build an act or a scene." These are traits...