Another look at America's orchestras

Practice?  Nope.  If you have enough cash, you can get to Carnegie Hall!

The 120th season is well underway at Carnegie Hall and an incessant stream of great orchestras is making its annual pilgrimage to that musical mecca.

The opening night gala, held October 5 featured an American orch.....oops, it featured world superstar (and the man who conducts with a toothpick if anything at all) Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg.  The program of Russian favorites also included cellist Yo Yo Ma in the Tchaikovsky "Rococo" Variations (yawn).  Three subsequent performances  included a complete cycle of the Tchaikovsky symphonies as well as excerpts from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, the grandest warhorse of them all--Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto and the first symphony of Shostakovich.  In all, nothing new here.

Possibly American orchestras can save the day (or the artform) at our nation's musical pantheon.  Here's a run-down:

Orpheus (October 13):  Mendelssohn, Haydn, Brahms and--what's this?  A world premiere by Cynthia Wong:  Memoriam.

MET Orchestra (October 16): sans its music director, James Levine.  Mozart, Mozart, Strauss and....you guessed it! (maybe not) a John Harbison premiere:  Closer To My Own Life.

Leo Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra (October 21):  Lots of Bach and a smattering of Schoenberg.

(By the way, even though its not an American orchestra, the Vietnam National Symphony made its first American appearance, performing, among other works, three works by indigenous composers.  No apologies here!)

Philadelphia Orchestra (October 25):  Ho-hum, Faure, Beethoven and Shostakovich (at least it was his 10th symphony)

Minnesota Orchestra (October 27):  Not one, but TWO Tchaikovsky's and Neilsen's Third Symphony.

Mannes Orchestra (November 2):  Even this is pretty much old hat:  Hovhaness: Mysterious Mountain, Kernis, and Rite of Spring.  It's almost 100 years old!  That's not new anymore!

And so it goes.  The Atlanta Symphony throws in a Rachmaninoff Concerto so the audience can swallow its diet of a premiere and Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy.  

Readers should look toward Greg Sandow's blog.  He is developing a number of new ideas in audience growth and possible ways of advancing the American orchestra, rather than allowing it to become (if it hasn't already) a museum piece visited only by an every-graying populace.