Word: symphonicment
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Further, American symphonic culture is not some recent import but a populist movement whose roots stretch back to the mid-19th century: the New York Philharmonic, the nation's oldest, was founded the same year, 1842, as the Vienna Philharmonic. Many of the major U.S. ensembles are more than 100...
The first and most obvious problem has to do with money. Unlike the newly fashionable lean and mean corporations, symphonic ensembles cannot readily strip down. It takes the same number of musicians -- about 100 -- to play a Strauss tone poem today as it did a century ago, and a major...
Perhaps the most serious problem, however, is artistic. Concert programs have changed relatively little in a century, and not at all in the past 30 or 40 years. New works are often presented as a bitter pill to be washed down with familiar symphonic staples. Conductors, meanwhile, too often treat...
Another irony is that in the '30s, when the repertoire became codified, prominent conductors like Sergei Koussevitzky in Boston and Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia were far more adventurous than their contemporary counterparts. Koussevitzky, the Russian-born bassist turned maestro, commissioned and performed dozens of new works by American composers, and...
Surgery at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital in 1981 brought Fleisher some temporary relief, and in 1982 he made a two-fisted comeback, playing Franck's Symphonic Variations in Baltimore. But the treatment didn't last. Other careers beckoned, including teaching at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and conducting, but...