I just subscribed to a series in the 2008-2009 season at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, a well regarded second tier orchestra. Who put them in the second tier, and is it possible to claw your way up to first?
I’m assuming it’s always possible to change position, but it’s not like baseball where there are published standings and you can check the box scores. Heh, scores, get it? I kill me.
Probably the same people that decide what constitutes a $100 bottle of wine vs. a $50 bottle of wine. I personally agree, how the hell can you make such fine comparisons with so much variation? At a certain point you gotta be faking it.
At some point returns are diminished. One problem is likely just that they’ve got Cleveland AND Chicago (two storied orchestras) right on their doorstep. However, even taking from a pool the size of Cincinnati, I have little doubt the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra is at least 97% as good as any OTHER orchestra you’re going to find in the US. Surely Cincinnati doesn’t consider themselves “second tier.”
My WAG would be many orchestras are famous through their conductors. Cleveland is famous, but how much was the CSO and how much was George Szell?
…now time for the real music buffs to come in and tell me I’m wrong…LOL
Oh, I’m sure they will. But I bet they will also say that you’re right and they’re right. A great conductor can make for a great orchestra. First he elevates the level of the one he’s got, then he attracts better players and the whole thing takes off. But I’ve also heard the orchestra-philes say that great players with an ordinary conductor will only be good.
Nothing relevant to contribute to the OP’s question, except to say that after reading it the first thing I thought of was Peter Shickele’s New Horizons in Music Appreciation: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Does the orchestra receive public funding? In Germany, we have rankings of publicly funded orchestras and it is a budget thing. Although the ranking reflects the reputations of the orchestras to some extend, in the end it is a political decision based on what the state wants to spend in a particular city.
There are factors like the budget for the symphony. The more money you have, the more likely you are to attract the top musicians. If you can’t pay your orchestra members enough to live on, and they can play for an orchestra that does, that’s where they go. So, though smaller orchestras can be fine to listen to (I usually subscribe to the Schenectady Symphony, which probably only pays the conductor, the conertmaster, a few selected musicians, and the soloist), they will have lost their very best to other symphonies.
Hah, hah, good luck…the Big Five for now and the near future are New York/Philadelphia/Boston/Cleveland/Chicago, not necessarily in that order.
San Francisco is climbing up, due to Tilson-Thomas. I’m not sure why NY in still in the running, 'cause I hate Lorin Maazel, the old crank.
Yes, but if you fail you have to spend some time in the Agony Booth.
i.e. Branson.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry about the Big Five:
Here’s an article from 2000 about the American orchestras with the highest total budgets:
http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/000705-NL-big.html
It lists the top ten orchestras in this order:
Boston
Chicago
Los Angeles
San Francisco
New York
Philadelphia
Cleveland
Pittsburgh
Cincinnati
Minnesota
So Cincinnati is only barely out of the Big Five, which suggests that calling it a second-tier orchestra means that the Big Five are the first tier. In any case, as the Wikipedia entry notes, the set of orchestras in the Big Five seems to have been determined in 1965 with no change since then. There is obviously no objective ranking of these orchestras. This is determined just on the basis of some vague general consensus by people interested in symphony orchestras.
Branson has some fine acts. Noah the Musical (With live animals!) and Yakov Smirnof to name a few.