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Re: Being around a Top Five

Author: LarryBocaner ★2017
Date: 2007-07-26 14:03

"Top Five" is an historical artifact, dating back to the 1940's and earlier when only those five orchestras provided their players with anything close to a living wage. In fact, when I was a youngster it was the "Big Three": Boston, New York and Philadelphia that mattered; Chicago and Cleveland muscled their way totally into that company in the '50's.

Public image has always lagged far behind the facts of what is happening on stage. When I first came East, as a student at Tanglewood in 1951, when I told my fellow students that my teacher (Jerry Stowell) was a member of the Chicago Symphony, I was patronizingly told "That's nice, but of course Chicago is not in the same class as Boston/Philly/New York." Imagine my shock hearing the BSO butcher Mahler First that summer, when I had been spoiled previously hearing Chicago play it superbly under Kubelik and Walter! When I browbeat my Juilliard buddies into going to hear the CSO play at Carnegie Hall in 1953, their jaws were agape at the the (unexpected) brilliance of the Orchestra. And of course the New York critics were largely unimpressed -- responding more, it think, to their prejudices than to what they and the audience were hearing on stage!

Since the emergence of player militancy in the 1960's, the economic condition of musicians in at least a dozen US orchestras (adjusted, perhaps, for cost of living in their venues) is very close to that of the historic big five. Many fine players have made quality-of-life decisions to remain in metropolitan areas that offer better family life/recreational/clean air advantages than do the Big Five cities. In my own former orchestra (National Symphony, Washington) we've had players formerly with Cleveland, Boston and Philadelphia -- also Canadian Brass). And I got to spend the bulk of my NSO career living on a 5-acre horse farm, less than a half-hour commute from the Kennedy Center. The lucrative income from recording, which was once the real difference between the big five and the "others" has largely dried up for everybody. The kind of payroll disparity that separates the Yankees from the Twins doesn't exist to the same degree in the world of --at least--the top dozen orchestras. (And don't the Twins and Brewers have a better W/L record than the Yankees?)

So let's not equate snobbery (a la blumberg?) with real excellence! There is a lot of both to go around.

Larry Bocaner
National Symphony (retired)

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