Part of my summer has been devoted to settling in with stacks of recordings of several American orchestras in their earlier incarnations, in particular the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra back in the 'fifties and 'sixties, when Antàl Dorati and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski led the band in Northrop Auditorium, a graceless barn on the U of M campus. I'm also revisiting the nearly-forgotten but potent renaissance that came about when the aging Paul Paray took the helm of a foundering Detroit Symphony. Both would qualify as 'regional' orchestras in the lingo of the time, but I can't say I care much for such a subtly derogatory term. Nor is it accurate. If Minneapolis was regional, then so was Boston and Philadelphia and New York and just about anywhere else that can be described as a region, which is to say anywhere and everywhere. At least nobody got in the habit of calling them 'provincial'.
The term cropped up in comparison to the so-called Big Five orchestras, a term joined at the hip with the iron lock held over the recording industry by just a few labels. In the United States that meant Columbia and RCA Victor who, despite the proliferation of smaller labels, dominated the marketplace. The 'Big Five' were mostly RCA stalwarts, although Columbia had a good run of it as well: Lenny's New York Philharmonic and Ormandy's Philadelphians were Columbia Masterworks cash cows, although before the 1950s both were on RCA. Boston and Chicago were firmly RCA, while Cleveland was initially relegated to Columbia's sideline Epic, only later to be brought into the Columbia fold proper. Despite RCA's enlightened practice of opening the door to alternate orchestras (San Francisco and Dallas come immediately to mind), it was the Big Five who made up the lion's share of the offerings in one's local record store.
But it was never all that simple or clear cut. The United States was hardly the only country with orchestras that were recording. In Europe, EMI was going gangbusters with not only the major English orchestras, but also the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics. Decca came roaring into the field in the 1950s, first with Ansermet's Geneva-based L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and then with an increasingly posh series of orchestras that eventually came to include such giants as Amsterdam's Concertgebouw, the London Symphony Orchestra, and eventually first-rate New World outfits such as Montréal and San Francisco. And then there was the lordly Deutsche Grammophon and its unimpeachable Berlin and Vienna orchestras with their equally upper-crust conductors.
Nonetheless, record-buying was fairly straightforward in those days. You bought Lenny and the NY Phil, Ormandy and the Philly, Reiner and the Chicago, Szell and the Cleveland, first Munch then Leinsdorf and the Boston. Or you went Euro and bought Karajan in Berlin and Vienna, Böhm ditto, Boult and Previn and Beecham and Barbirolli in London. The Iron Curtain saw to it that Dresden and Leipzig were mostly out of reach, and the Cold War that the Moscow and St. Petersburg (a.k.a. Leningrad) orchestras popped up only rarely on lousy Angel pressings of second-rate Melodiya masters. Unless you were just desperate for certain repertory items or knew nothing whatsoever about orchestras, you steered clear of the EMI and RCA releases from the ratty Orchestre de Paris or, even worse, the near-incompetent Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. Beyond the occasional oddity from the occasional obscurity, that was about it.
Tidbit: Italy and France haven't fielded any orchestras worth a damn, but they have both produced quite a few stellar conductors. Think Toscanini, Giulini, Abbado, Monteux, Munch. That's not as weird as it seems. Opera houses, which France and Italy have in spades, are the training ground par excellence for conductors.
Tidbit Deux: orchestral pipsqueaks Italy and France have both played critically important roles in the history of Western music. The Netherlanders have not been particularly notable contributors, but Amsterdam's Concertgebouw is arguably the greatest orchestra of them all. Furthermore, although England and the United States have played relatively peripheral roles in the history of Western Music, the two nations host a disproportionately fat share of the world's finest orchestras.
Every once in a while you hear people talk as though the concept of a Big Five was still valid, but in fact it never existed in any meaningful way beyond basic marketing and availability. Certainly it's meaningless in today's audio market.
Consider the ubiquitous presence of a 'regional' orchestra—Seattle—in regards to American music. Seattle has seen to it that we have vast swathes of composers whose output was mostly inaccessible, solid writers such as David Diamond, Walter Piston, Vincent Persechetti, William Schuman, Alan Hovhaness, and others. Maybe I don't look to Seattle for a compelling Beethoven cycle, but I'm deeply grateful to them for taking on repertory that the so-called major labels rarely touch. On the other end of the scale, the once-mighty Philadelphia Orchestra has nearly dropped off the discographic map. Their last commercial relationship, with the small Finnish label Ondine, produced a number of marvelous discs, but since then Philadelphia, like many American orchestras, has been relying on an in-house label. But Philadelphia hasn't been knocking them out of the park with the regularity of San Francisco's SFS Media and its shelf of Grammy awards. The former Big Five are but shadows of their former selves where recording is concerned; Boston moved to Deutsche Grammophon under Ozawa and seems to have come unmoored since his departure; Chicago had a great run on Decca with Solti but little since.
As a result, formerly lower-profile orchestras are now much more prominent thanks to their pre-eminence in the recording marketplace. San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, Nashville, Minnesota in the United States; several of London's major outfits including the LSO and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Manchester's Hallé and the resurgent Royal Liverpool. Of the grand old European orchestras both Berlin and Vienna remain discographic powerhouses, while the once modest Dresden has moved into a much more central (and welcome) position. Apparently nothing can keep the Concertgebouw down; EMI back in the day under Mengelberg, then Epic with Van Beinum, then all those golden achievements with Haitink on Philips, now the highly successful in-house RCO Live label.
In-house labels seem to be holding most of the trump cards these days. Save for the group associated with Naxos, Channel Classics, and BIS, many orchestras are doing well by releasing meticulously-engineered recordings of their own live performances. San Francisco never had all that compelling of a presence with RCA Victor, despite recording exclusively with the label from 1925 through 1960, followed by a brief fling in the 1990s. Today's spectacular shower of masterful productions with MTT on SFS Media outshadow just about anything from the orchestra's past, including the Blomstedt/SFS partnership on Decca (mid-1980s through early 1990s) which may have struck musical oil but suffered from CDs consigned to disgracefully short shelf lives. The SFS's brief flings on Deutsche Grammophon and Philips are nearly forgotten.
As I marvel over the fine balance and insightful playing of Paul Paray's Detroit Symphony as they blazed through the Dvorak "New World" Symphony, I'm once again impressed by how much dandy music-making was likely lost back in the old days when RCA and Columbia held most of the cards, leaving the so-called 'crumbs' to smaller labels such as Mercury, Capitol, and Westminister—who, as it turned out, bequesthed posterity with a priceless documentation of those orchestras that they captured. Clearly, there was no Big Five. The Americas and Europe were aglow with fine orchestral playing everywhere. It's just a shame that so much of it wasn't preserved for later generations, while (alas) so many humdrum, lacquered, and blah performances from the 'majors' have survived.