Ormandy’s Orchestra
Whether he may have to leave next year, in view of the Association’s position on retirement, is one of the questions gripping Philadelphia music lovers today. He is 64 this month — and has full plans for the enlarged season and the anticipated festival: Will the Association, whose total backing he has always been able to count on, insist on his retirement, as they have insisted in the past on the compulsory leaving of even such superb musicians as flutist William Kincaid? Most people who know the board feel they will not — but there may be a certain amount of bitterness among the musicians, who have to face up to their own retirement whether they are ready or not. Meanwhile a series of the country’s most outstanding young conductors will tome in to do guest spots during the year ahead; in what the annual report sedately described as an unusually large number to share the Orchestra podium during the 1963-64 season they listed Donald Johanos, Milton Katims, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and Werner Torkanowsky. (A dark horse successor is concertmaster Anshel Brusilow.) The men in the Orchestra themselves will be eying these younger lights with considerable speculation, wondering which will eventually be their Man With The Baton.
STICK MAN. Few things in this spotty world can be examined and found to be without flaw but it is very difficult to fault the Philadelphia Orchestra in any department. Does tension sometimes exist between the conductor and the musicians? To quote a local musicologist, "This is not only to be expected — it is almost to be hoped for. Every one of those hundred or more men sees himself as a virtuoso; he fully believes that, with breaks, he’d either be appearing here as soloist — or he’d be the one handling the baton. The feeling about discipline runs high; but no man can make one hundred musicians play even in the same key, much less produce that wonderful sound, without exercising the most stringent discipline. In the tension that results, the music takes on feeling and quality."
And it’s true that, in the end, the men like him after all the beefing is over. Says one of them, "Stokowski is always a joy, and we play well and happily for him. A man like Bernstein, now — I respect him as a musician but I’m telling you, we’d never be able to play with all that choreography going on up front. No — one way or another, Ormandy’s our boy." As for the Maestro — he calls them "my children," with an affectionate wink.
Are they too devoted to the standard works? Here Ormandy finds himself caught in a bind between the conservative Association, which always expresses a certain amount of anxiety, and the musicians — who will need many, many extra hours of rehearsal before they have mastered a new work. Of the five Ormandy commissions — works by Walter Piston, Richard Yardumian, Aaron Copeland, Roger Sessions and Roy Harris, only the Sessions composition remains to be played; "I only have eight pages of it," Ormandy reports wistfully. ”I’d love a chance to play it, but I can’t schedule it yet." And there are other works in the contemporary field that he would be happy to take on; time doesn’t permit.
