The Pittsburgh Symphony is America's greatest orchestra. Full stop. It's not Cleveland; great as they are, they're still a little bit too cold and 'respectable' for that title, and it hasn't been Boston since the 50s. The California orchestras are more exciting in both the repertoire they pick and the performances they give, and thank god for that, but it's not a differentiated enough model to make up the distance classical music has lost to make our music relevant again. And god knows, it's not New York, Philly or Chicago.
The 'great' modern orchestras make no mistakes, and that's the biggest mistake of all. With the Pittsburgh Symphony, at least under Honeck, you hear a wrong note, imprecise ensemble, or intonation problems every less than thirty seconds, and it doesn't matter at all because they are one of the few orchestras in the world who truly attempt communicating something with every bar. Who in their right mind would rather listen to Pollini than Schnabel or Kempff? It's the same with Pittsburgh vs. the modern Orchestras with a Capital O of every world metropole who play as though virtuosity and 'sound culture' is all that matters. That's the difference between listening to an orchestra like Pittsburgh and listening to an orchestra like... insert big name Orchestra here...
When I heard them do Bruckner 8 with Manfred Honeck conducting, it was like seeing the Sistine Chapel for the first time. When I heard them with Mariss Jansons do The Firebird from the front row right behind 'the maestro,' it felt like being present the creation of the world itself. Hearing them do Haydn's Creation and Beethoven's Fidelio live left me with my jaw on the floor and my tear ducts empty. This orchestra is both louder and softer than any other in America, warmer and richer, more bass heavy and more flexible, and it's expression filled with the deepest humanity. It's like hearing a gigantic organ with an infinity of pipes and colors. I wish they did more new music, but I'd rather hear them in 'classic' rep than nearly any orchestra in Europe.
There is a gigantic treasure trove of Pittsburgh Symphony broadcasts waiting to be released of music never recorded in the studio by Steinberg, Honeck, Jansons, untold legendary guests, and other music directors less worth mentioning.
There are much more refined and sophisticated orchestral 'Nachts,' but no performance I've ever heard throws itself into it with this much passion, and yet there is no 'show' here, no calculation for effect: it's pure content, played from pure inner fire. The reason is partially because they had the greatest conductor of my lifetime igniting them (one of only two Jansons/Pittsburgh performances you can find on youtube, and Jansons was never better than he was in Pittsburgh), but he can't do it without an orchestra ready to work as no other orchestra does. Whether in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Detroit, Cincinnati, Nashville, Louisville, or Minneapolis, you have American orchestras of musicians who were not the stars of their conservatory 'studios', but because they weren't, they had something greater to prove, and they work like dogs in a way the stars who make to New York and Chicago rarely do. The reason is the horrible truth they know in their bones: that if they give anything less than their best, they will disband. They're cultural glories of America, glories well past the contemporary Boston Symphony or Philadelphia Orchestra, and every one of them is in danger.
Travel to their cities, hear the extraordinary things they do, because you may not be able to hear them for much longer.
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