on orchestras...

[acroyear]

Why my criteria matter - Sandow:

Why should it matter, to measure orchestra quality in such detail?

Because, to begin with, we for the most part discuss how well orchestras play only in the most general way. We have an idea, let's say, that Cleveland (or at least this used to be the belief) stands above most American orchestra. Or that Berlin might be the best orchestra in the world. But what exactly do we mean by that?

Or we think that San Francisco, under MTT, stands very high. But do we mean that their programming does, or their playing? How does their playing rank, compared to other American orchestras their size?

Compare this to what any baseball fan knows. You're a Mets fan? If you're serious about it, you know their strengths and weaknesses, position by position. Stellar shortstop, really good third baseman (though he's injured), promising young first baseman (also injured), left fielder who forgot how to hit.

Well, repertoire matters, and hand-in-hand with that is the expectations by the audience (as well as the musical director and the orchestra itself). A local orchestra may not be expected to take on Ligeti or Takemitsu, or may be expected based on the conductor to take on new (generally tonal) music more often (Seattle under Schwartz, or Baltimore under Alsop, both of whom are champions of new composers, and new American composers at that).

So, too, the San Francisco you cite - I really don't know MTT's tastes beyond what shows up on the PBS shows, which are mostly early and late Romantic, or tonal 20th Century (Copland). Even his late-period Stravinsky recording was with the LSO. For those that don't "live with the orchestra", its hard for us to know how large a range of material it is they play.

So in this, the baseball analogy does somewhat fall short. In baseball, everybody plays, well, baseball. Orchestras are judged by the quality of the "core" rep (the Beethoven cycle, the Brahms cycle, the Wagner operas, Stravinsky's Rite, Debussy's Faun), the diversity of works they play in a particular period, and the diversity of periods they can play, much of which is the decision of the board and the orchestra's leads when they select a music director.

This is different again from baseball where the owner (representing the board) selects the manager who drives the emphasis from there. In orchestras, the members have a say in who they pick, which in turn has an impact on what they play as well as how well they play it.

Thus, a comparison of De Moines vs NYPO is much more an apples-oranges comparison than it is to just compare a minor league ball team with a major...and that's even before the ways an orchestra can rise above its status under a talented leader, like Birmingham under Rattle did throughout the 90s (who still knew his limits - Birmingham played a number of Mahler symphonies, but he never recorded the 9th with them...).

Comments

[thelongshot.livejournal.com]

This is different again from baseball where the owner (representing the board) selects the manager who drives the emphasis from there. In orchestras, the members have a say in who they pick, which in turn has an impact on what they play as well as how well they play it.

Well, players in pro sports can have a say in who coaches them, but that's usually considered a bad idea.

Another place where the analogy doesn't hold up is that Baseball has statistics to help judge the quality of the different pieces of the baseball team. As imperfect as those stats can be, they can give the fan some idea of how they are doing. With an orchestra, those judgements are more subjective.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

The statistics make sense because as I mentioned, baseball players play BASEBALL. There's no difference in the game from one team to the next or one year to the next (give or take instant replay every becoming law).

By contrast, different orchestras necessarily have different reps.

Another difference is that we can, through television, see all baseball teams on an equal basis - any game, any time, any past game, in an instant if you've paid for the right cable channels.

With orchestras, we can only ever really know our local one, which we end up having to "like" out of necessity as there isn't another option. Otherwise, we have to only compare by recordings, in which case we're also judging the particular conductor (who may not be the orchestra's director), and the engineering, and the label's choice of what to release - classical music is still driven by the old-school A&R approach with only a few conductors (Alsop, Rattle) having full reign to what gets released on mainstream contract labels, and others (MTT with the SFO, anybody conducting the LSO) having more privileges through the fact that the orchestra itself can run its own label. So our judgement of orchestras in comparison gets limited to just the particular works that they all record (again, things like the Beethoven cycle) which may not necessarily be that orchestra's strength.

[stori-lundi.livejournal.com]

My dad used to say that you can tell how good an orchestra was by how many French horns play the opening to Respighi's Pines of Rome. Most only have one because it's a killer lick. A good orchestra two. He's only ever seen 3 and that was with Chicago.