CSO - still stuck with Muti and a less than great sounding hall.

[Roland Flessner]

And I should mention, the strike was resolved last weekend and concerts have resumed.

[barryguerrero]

At least people can have this dialog now.  Thirty years ago, if somebody suggested to a Chicagoan, or a sycophant of the CSO, that Orchestra Hall was an acoustical detriment to the orchestra, that person could get hung. As a young brass player, I had the CSO shoved down my throat constantly. I was an outcast for for not being one of their adoring worshipers - my colleagues would shake their heads. I always felt that with Herseth in charge, the trumpets and trombones constantly overplayed their dynamics, often times making little or no distinction between forte, fortissimo and triple forte. As a result, the horns often times had a hard, brittle sound because of their efforts to keep up. Arnold Jacob's wind capacity (lungs) had deteriorated by this point, so even he couldn't put a sufficient cushion under all that noise (no such problem with Pokorny).  Because the brass were the kingpins, the percussion constantly played underneath them, except for sometimes overplayed timpani (really loud timpani in the Levine recordings).  The woodwinds were nowhere as good as they had been under Reiner, Martinon or Kubelik.  I really believe the hall played into this, as well as Solti's strange tonal concepts - what he was trying to get out of the orchestra (some say he was chasing after the Vienna Phil. sound).

I saw the CSO play Mahler 5 'on tour' in the latter 1980's - perhaps the single worst orchestral performance I've yet to hear. But what really shocked me, was just awful Dale Clevenger sounded. You won't hear ANYBODY say that! To me, he sounded as though he were using a mouthpiece that was too wide and too shallow, in order to obtain maximum agility and get all the right notes. His solos were were hard and 'brackish' sounding. I was astounded - he sounded nothing like he does on his wonderful recording of the Mozart horn concerti.

Well, that brings me to 2019 and Riccardo Muti. I've only sampled one of their recordings: Bruckner 9. It's OK. He certainly has addressed balances and brass timbres! The orchestra makes a lovely, dark sound.  I just don't find him interpretively interesting in Austro/German music. I think the Giulini/CSO B9 is really very, very good (while the Solti B9 is a complete non-starter). To be fair, most of the CSO recordings with Giulini and Boulez are quite good. Levine is Levine (neither bad nor great in my book).

[Roland Flessner]

I’ll just add some comments from a somewhat different perspective. First, discerning listeners, along with CSO musicians themselves, have always been willing to criticize Orchestra Hall. Before the 1967 remodel, the players complained that they couldn’t hear each other. Nearly everyone seems to agree that after that project, the hall was worse for audiences and recordings. RCA and Decca made almost all their post-’67 recordings elsewhere, though DG managed to make some fine-sounding sessions in Orchestra Hall before the late-’90s remodel, which happened to coincide with the near-extinction of studio orchestral recording. Since then, with that troublesome acoustic reflector, I’m skeptical that anyone could make a good recording in that hall.

Also keep in mind a quirk of history: The music director used to lead most of the concerts, but in the modern era, he or she may be in town for as little as eight weeks in a season. We hear many more concerts led by guest conductors that did previous generations of patrons, and that limits the damage a ham-fisted music director can inflict on the orchestra. We can, and should, complain about the Solti sound, but even during the Solti era, the CSO often didn’t sound like that when led by someone else.

I certainly agree that the orchestra is in good form these days, even as I reinforce the point that the conductor makes a huge difference. Last season Herbert Blomstedt, who had not been here for many years, led a concert including the Eroica. He used a smallish ensemble to deliver a performance that was lively, transparent and powerful. It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that I wasn’t thinking about where the performance lay on the spectrum between overstuffed Romanticism and an acerbic HIP rendering. (And I do typically think about stuff like that a lot.) It just worked, and it was a great privilege to hear the result when a great conductor and a top-flight orchestra click.

[barryguerrero]

Thank you for your input. It's excellent.

[waderice]

Yes, this is a Mahler forum, but I will say something about making recordings in Orchestra Hall vs. concertizing there.  I personally have never been to a concert in Orchestra Hall, though I have been at the Symphony Center.

Reiner's two Mahler recordings there (made before the first hall renovation) sound quite good, as do his many non-Mahler ones.  The hall before its first renovation was noted as an excellent venue for making recordings, but even back then, as Roland said, was noted as notorious acoustically for concerts.  Other non-Mahler recordings made by Reiner there were excellent, musically and engineering-wise by RCA's team of Mohr/Layton, though microphone placement was critical to making a recording stand out.  Interestingly, the in-concert recordings in monophonic sound made by Stephen Temmer in the late 'fifties have a different acoustic sound than do the RCA ones.

Maybe the fact that the musicians couldn't hear each other worked in their favor for making excellent performances and recordings.  That meant that musicians needed to continually and carefully watch a demanding conductor like Reiner to get the excellent results of that recorded legacy.

Wade

[barryguerrero]

Again, excellent input. I appreciate it.