Memories of Orchestral Greatness

The ever-present mythologies surrounding the so called “Top Five “ American orchestras have always seemed absurd to me. Of course the five orchestras that have historically received the dubious accolade in the United States have been those of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago. Sadly, the all to human propensity to numerically categorize and rate anything and everything is never more evident than in the useless attempt to rate great orchestras and conductors. I became aware of this firsthand as a CIncinnati Public Schools student in the late 1950s, when I regularly attended CIncinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) youth concerts. The consistently superb playing of that orchestra of obviously Germanic origin, featuring its magnificent string section, and led in those years by the great, self-effacing, Max Rudolph, was a wonder to behold. Rudolph came to the CSO from the Metropolitan Opera, and took the orchestra on a State Department sponsored world tour in the late fifties. After listening to this brilliant recording, with its resplendent 1950s era Decca sound signature, all of the useless “Top Five” mythologies should forever be laid to rest. As an aside, one of the reasons that this is a great recording, considered by some to be the finest Bruckner 7 ever recorded, is that the recording venue, the magnificent CIncinnati Music Hall, is to this day one of the finest orchestral acoustical spaces in the world, This Decca Gold recording is superbly engineered to the point that, with a superior playback system, one who knows the hall can actually hear that great acoustical space “breathing” throughout the recording. One only hopes that HDTT will secure more CSO Decca Gold tapes from the Max Rudolph era. Bravo HDTT, as this is an audiophile recording for the ages.