Underrated Classical Musicians: Nashville Symphony Orchestra

Yesterday we got news that the Nashville Symphony was furloughed all year. An orchestra without a season is an orchestra whose chances of folding is probably over 50%. Orchestras much more august reputations like the New York Philharmonic and the Met are cancelling their entire autumn season. This is all a terrible prelude to what might be happening to orchestras all around America.

But it's doubly a tragedy because while nobody thinks of the Nashville Symphony as even one of the Top 20 orchestras in America, it's easily one of the most important. Tackling repertoire and unheard composers more supposedly distinguished orchestras wouldn't dare. The Nashville Symphony is a crown jewel in American music - serving music rather than its own prestige.

For more than 20 years under the direction of Leonard Bernstein's former indispensable assistant, Kenneth Schermerhorn, the Nashville Symphony was everything an American orchestra should be - playing everything for everyone in some of the most wide-ranging and diverse community outreach America has yet thought of. In one of the three or four most musical towns in America, the Nashville Symphony became as embedded into the city's cultural fabric as any orchestra in America.

The list of composers they've championed on record under both Schermerhorn and his successor, the also underrated Giancarlo Guerrero from Costa Rica, is a who's who of underrated American music: Michael Daugherty, Roberto Sierra, Richard Danielpour, Joan Tower, Jennifer Higdon, Amy Beach, Terry Riley, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, Aaron Jay Kernis, John Harbison, Joseph Schwantner, Elliott Carter, and George Whitefield Chadwick. They've done classical crossover with Bela Fleck, and while everybody gives lip service to many of the Great American Scores, the Nashville Symphony put the money where the ears are, and recorded perhaps the three Great American Operas: West Side Story, Porgy and Bess, and Amahl and the Night Visitors, all meticulously researched to be according to the composer's exact specifications. They've recorded South American music too, including the complete Bachianas Brasillieras by my beloved Villa-Lobos and the rollickingly brillian classical compositions of the Argentinan national musician, the tango composer Astor Piazzolla, along with one of my two favorite 20th century operas: Ravel's mystifyingly underperformed L'Enfant et les Sortileges

This is everything a great orchestra should do, and now they're paying the price for the crime of showing that you can simultaneously serve music, musicians, and the community, with their livelihoods, and such is the ruthlessness of modern American life that nobody's in a position to step in and save this national treasure of Americana.