Ormandy’s Orchestra

The six concerts during that first season brought such an overwhelming response that they were increased the next year to 14 pairs, and eventually to 22 pairs. They were played first by an ensemble of 80, which went up to 85 and has gradually increased over the years to meet the orchestral demands made by such composers as Wagner, to the pit’s present strength of 105 (of whom five are women).

The orchestra has always had Mittel-European bosses. Scheel was succeeded in 1907 by a fellow-German, Carl Pohlig, and then in 1912 by Leopold Stokowski, whose stamp as a man and a conductor remains indelibly on the Orchestra today, 28 years after he gave up his conductor’s post to pursue a career in Hollywood and New York. Stokowski brought a blazing persona I style, an interest in new music and new ways of playing old music, and a personal charm which makes musicians affirm that he "makes them play better than they know how."

He was from the beginning an outstanding personal success, not only with the musicians, and among the socially prominent Philadelphians who made up the board and a large proportion of the Friday afternoon audience — but among the music students and music lovers who sat in the balcony and the amphitheatre. The social set lionized Stokowski — but the students and the musical aficionados followed him to his home, after the prominent had visited in his dressing room backstage. There, they sat on the floor and listened to the Maestro talk. It was an education unique to Philadelphia and confined to a particular point in history. Stokowski’s flair fascinated the Victor Talking Machine people across the river in Camden. In 1917 they decided to gamble on a recording of a symphony group and invited the Orchestra to take the ferry ride across the Delaware to cut a record of two Hungarian dances by Brahms. In the subsequent 46 years — the past 20 of them with Columbia Records — the Orchestra has recorded the basic repertory of classical music and continues adding new composers and new works to the roster every year. In 1962 Columbia released 25 fresh albums. One, "The Sound of Christmas," recorded with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, sold over a half million copies in a month. It is, in fact, through the sale of recordings that the Philadelphia reached the enviable, and almost unbelievable, position of being able to declare a surplus of $128,000 last season.

Actually, the Philadelphia is by no means a poor orchestra in terms of dollars and cents although until last year it has habitual1y turned up with deficits on its books. It seems clear that this has been, more or less, a paper deficit partly induced by not amortizing money spent on improvements and partly by not clearly showing expected record royalties as accounts receivable. (It is Orchestra accounting practice to list royalties as income only on the basis of moneys actually paid in. The huge reservoir of anticipated income from albums now on the market — possibly as much as $3 million — does not show on the Association’s balance sheet.)