Do Orchestras Still Sound Different?

Half a century ago, you could often tell where an orchestra was from simply by listening to the way it played. German orchestras tended to sound heavier, with deep, mellow brass playing. Orchestras from Russia and Eastern Europe were recognizable from more fizzy brass and for iron-willed strings with the potency of paint stripper. You could tell a French orchestra from its virtuosic and sometimes citric woodwinds. American orchestras played with a sheen and smoothness that set them apart. The great old orchestras of central Europe lagged behind the conductor’s beat, as if they refused to be hurried. 

Now we live in a globalized world. Some central European orchestras still play on particular sorts of instruments (you might have noticed that the Berliner Philharmoniker’s trumpets are keyed from the side, not from the top). Otherwise, musicians take jobs in countries they weren’t raised or taught in, conductors travel around far more and the colossal wave of musical talent from the Far East has brought new influences into almost every orchestra in Europe, America and beyond. 

So the question is this: is it really still possible to hear tangible differences in some orchestras’ playing styles?

The Persistence of Sound Culture

I think it is. More to the point, I think it’s really interesting and rewarding to try to hear those differences – or to notice other characteristics that may or may not be part of a particular orchestra’s longstanding tradition. 

Some orchestras pride themselves on being absolutely local. The Czech Philharmonic has an entirely Czech membership, one reason it sounds like it does. Other orchestras have welcomed players of different nationalities and generations into their ranks while still managing to maintain playing styles or sound production methods that stretch back decades – to a time when that orchestra’s personnel was entirely different. This is what we refer to when we talk about a ‘sound culture.’

Plenty of the most interesting orchestras in this regard broadcast regularly on medici.tv. That offers us a perfect excuse to delve into the world of orchestral stylistics and sound cultures – and try to hear the differences. 

Talk to musicians about distinctive-sounding orchestras, and it usually isn’t long before the Staatskapelle Dresden comes up. ‘I could not have written the score for Lohengrin had I not heard the brilliance of the Dresden violins, nor any of my latter works had I not remembered the moving, melodious smoothness of the woodwind and the sonorous power of the brass’ – so said Richard Wagner of this Saxon orchestra, established in 1548.

Few orchestras can get away with resting so heavily on their traditions as this one does – partly because it sounds so good. As Wagner’s comment suggests, the Dresden Staatskapelle glows more than it thrusts – from deep, woody strings to veiled, throbbing horns. It is an opera orchestra as well as a symphonic one; as such, it tends to sing through the music it plays. Recently, critics have talked of its ‘warmly cosseting strings’, ‘mellifluous winds’ and ‘powerful but cleanly focused’ brass. 

Can we hear those things, in reality, in the current Staatskapelle Dresden? And can’t we just as easily hear similar qualities in other symphony orchestras, from Pittsburgh to Singapore? 

Saxon Sounds

Let’s look at the evidence. On the Festive Gala at the Semperoper Dresden, you immediately notice those German trumpets, played on keys from the side (the technical term is ‘rotary valve’ trumpets, and the sound is certainly less piercing than from a standard trumpet). When Golda Schultz sings ‘Deh, vieni’ from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro you certainly hear the mellifluous quality in the woodwinds referred to by that critic; the winds sound like flocking birds.

And the orchestra’s glow? Try this performance from the Staatskapelle of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2 under Sir Antonio Pappano. This is a symphony powered by melody that encompasses infernal whirlwinds, passionate declarations of love and heartfelt reflections of peace. It certainly sounds impassioned under Pappano, but the performance never shouts or hollers. Even Rachmaninov’s characteristic sense of snap and crackle seems reigned-in. 

In fact, you’d be hard-pushed to find a better example of that glowing sound than in this performance. Again we hear those mellifluous winds at the start of the first movement’s second subject. I was struck by the warm fizz of the brass chords, midway through the second movement (above). The Staatskapelle strings don’t always play completely together, but perhaps that lies behind their very human, intuitive sound.

The Staatskapelle Dresden’s most obvious Saxon counterpart is the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. This ensemble is also the guardian of a treasured sound tradition. When Felix Mendelssohn was the orchestra’s conductor, his concertmaster Ferdinand David would stand to his left on a podium, with the entire violin and viola sections also playing on their feet behind. This practice led to strong, tight, unified string playing that soon fed into what’s now described as the orchestra’s signature strength. 

Other sections feed into that sound too. The orchestra’s winds can be potent while its brass have retained some of that fizz associated with Soviet orchestras (this one, like the Staatskapelle Dresden, was behind the iron curtain for decades). All this contributes to a distinctive sonic weight and power – a density of sound that was described by former Gewandhauskapellmeister (as the orchestra titles its chief conductor) Riccardo Chailly as an ‘incredible wave.’ 

That wave thunders into the climax and final pages of Dvořák’s Othello Overture, on this performance from the orchestra under current Gewandhauskapellmeister Andris Nelsons. But any good orchestra these days is flexible, and you hear, at the start of that same overture, just how tender the Gewandhaus strings can sound. 

In the songs by Dvořák and Smetana sung by Kristine Opolais, we hear the in-built flexibility and aural sensitivity of an orchestra used to accompanying singers in the opera house (there’s more of that power in an astonishing performance of ‘Jak je mi?’ from Smetana’s opera Dalibor). 

Also striking, in the performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9 that follows, is the virtuosity not just of the orchestra as a single entity – a collective organism – but as individuals. Sometimes, string players towards the back desks of an orchestra can seem less engaged and impassioned than those on the front desks. Not at the Gewandhaus, where they play with freely expressive bodily movement. 

This, surely, is evidence that Ferdinand David’s legacy of fully-engaged string desks lives on in the orchestra two centuries later, even if the Gewandhaus strings now play sitting down. Can you hear that ‘incredible wave’ referred to by Chailly? I think you can. 

Big Beasts: Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics

Orchestras don’t come much more iconic than the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics – neither of them strangers to medici.tv. These two flagship ensembles actually have markedly different profiles, with the Berliner Philharmoniker having emerged as one of the great orchestral innovators of recent decades while its counterpart in Austria sticks resolutely to its strong traditions, including that of never employing a chief conductor.

And what of their sound traditions? Here, the two ensembles can also seem to resemble one another while being wholly different. Both prize their sense of blend, characterized by soft brass playing, but while the Berliner Philharmoniker has always had a sense of attack – playing ‘out’ from the stage – the Vienna Philharmonic prefers what could be described as a ‘soft attack’. 

The Vienna Philharmonic doubles as an opera orchestra, and has a unique sense of rhythmic flexibility, and not just in the waltzes that we associate with its home town. Where the Berlin sound has been described as ‘golden’, the Vienna sound is perhaps more ‘rounded’; it plays on horns, clarinets and goat-skinned timpani that orchestras outside Austria don’t use. All feed into a more homogenous sound – one that the orchestra’s timpanist recently described as ‘wrapping around you like a winter coat.’

We can compare the sounds of both using their performances of symphonies by Brahms. Under Christian Thielemann at the Musikverein earlier this year, the Vienna Philharmonic lays all its traditional qualities out. You see them before you hear them: the extra coil in the Viennese horns; the way every male player ties his neck-tie with the same distinctive fat knot. 

At the start of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, the orchestra’s ‘soft attack’ is very much in evidence. There are no hard-edges in the string playing at all – in the full concert video, listen at 43’50, 51’40 (also in the excerpt below) and again at 1’17’10 in the last movement, passages that normally induce far more angular playing from string sections.

In the second movement, we hear how different those Viennese horns and woodwinds sound – the horns softer, the clarinets darker (the Viennese clarinets are literally built thicker, with more wood). But those things would count for nothing without equally distinctive and highly sensitive playing; listen at 55’20 to the way the bassoon supports the clarinet solo, like a cushion underneath it. 

The finale of Brahms’s symphony lays out the orchestra’s sectional qualities one by one: the rich but soft string sound at 1’11’55, the same qualities in the trombones at 1’15’15 (below) and the way these stylistics are echoed by the rest of the brass, woodwinds and (again) strings that join in afterwards. 

In 2010, the Berliner Philharmoniker played its annual European Concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford whose interior, like that of the Musikverein, is lined with wood – this presents a good point of comparison with the Vienna Philharmonic’s Brahms, given the Sheldonian Theatre’s acoustic is far closer to that of the Musikverein than the Philharmonie’s in Berlin is. 

The first thing you notice in Brahms’s Symphony No 1 under Daniel Barenboim is how deeply the string sections dig into each phrase, and how much those string players actually move their bodies while playing. Listen to the expressivity of the violin sound in the second movement at 56’10 (below) – and how it’s immediately echoed by the cellos. This is the sort of inter-sectional reactivity that lies behind the claim that the Berliner Philharmoniker plays like an expanded chamber group.

It’s often said that Claudio Abbado instilled this conversational, chamber-music-like playing style in the orchestra during his time as its chief conductor. We probably hear it best in the opening of the third movement, when horn, strings and woodwinds interact right at the start. Not only do you see principal flute Emmanuel Pahud looking directly at his colleagues when playing (turning not just his head, but his whole body); you also see string section principals looking behind them at their colleagues. 

I know I know…we’re talking about sound here, not looks. But these actions have a clear effect on the way the Berliner Philharmoniker plays and its sense of both reactivity and blend. When things really get going in the finale (below), the brass sound is wondrous but still, somehow, blended with the rest of the ensemble – all while losing nothing in excitement. At the end of that movement, you hear the orchestra ‘playing out’ in a far more expressionistic way than you’d normally hear from the softer attack of the Vienna Philharmonic. 

The Curious Case of Bamberg

An orchestra with a slightly lower profile but a much-prized sound-culture is the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, based in the picturesque town of Bamberg in Bavaria. Listeners to this orchestra speak of a dark, velvety, smooth and notably loud sound that even has a name: the ‘Böhmischer Klang’. It is derived, in part, from the many musicians (and their instruments) from Prague who helped form the orchestra in 1946 and the reverberant acoustic of the large church, the Dominikanerbau, where the orchestra played for 50 years until its current concert hall was opened in 1993. 

Don’t take my word for any of this, because its music director Jakub Hrůša explains it all rather better than I could in the fascinating film The Sound of Bamberg. 

Anyway, the best way to experience the ‘Böhmischer Klang’ is to hear it. In this concert under Herbert Blomstedt, one of the first things you notice is that, unlike some of the older, more venerated German orchestras including the Staatskapelle Dresden, the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra plays exactly on the beat, whether in Schubert or Bruckner. In Schubert’s Symphony No 3, we get a taste of that dark sound, but it’s best experienced when combined with music of greater density and volume in the Bruckner symphony that follows. 

New Worlds

These are not phenomena confined to European orchestras. Even with their collective reputation for sheen and smoothness, there are big variations in sound among American orchestras – from the delicacy and elegance of The Cleveland Orchestra to the voluminous warmth of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s strings. 

Elegance is often a word associated with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo – the orchestra of Japan’s public service broadcaster, which celebrates its centenary in 2026. This is an orchestra whose precision and even-temper are audible even today (aided, it has to be said, by the quietness and attentiveness of Japanese concert audiences). 

Like the Staatskapelle Dresden, the NHK Symphony Orchestra has a pathological aversion to the brash. But it also has a highly sophisticated idea of orchestral ‘blend’ – the way in which sections imitate and embed each other’s sound. It’s something slightly different from the blend we discussed in relation to the Berliner Philharmoniker; erring more towards common focus than seamless reactivity. For evidence of that and the orchestra’s famed ‘elegance’, check out this performance of Bruckner’s Symphony No 7 (below) under its former chief conductor, Paavo Järvi. 

All those orchestras have a long history. What about a more recently-formed ensemble? The Singapore Symphony Orchestra was established in 1979 and took remarkably little time to achieve international-level standards. In 2002, it moved into the new Esplanade Concert Hall where the transparent acoustic incubated deeper collective listening. A decade later, it was being recognized as one of the finest ensembles of its kind outside Europe or North America. 

When the Singapore Symphony Orchestra visited the BBC Proms in 2014, a critic at The Guardian newspaper noted that ‘the tang in the SSO’s brass throughout the evening suggested an orchestral sound modelled along Russian rather than western European lines.’ 

Sure enough, music director from 1997-2019, Lan Shui, made a string of fine recordings of Russian music with the orchestra, including a recording of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No 1 about which Gramophone magazine wrote that ‘it would be difficult to imagine a more compelling or indeed idiomatic account.’ That is mightily impressive, given the competition that exists on record in that music. 

There is a history of Russian players in the SSO, but these days it’s staffed almost entirely by Asian musicians, most Singaporean, Chinese or Malay. And how gorgeous does it sound in this all-Rachmaninov concert under current music director Hans Graf? 

We’ve talked a lot about Rachmaninov, but the Russian composer is a good yardstick of orchestral sound, given the high expression and subtlety he asks from orchestras as well as the range of colours, and the particular way he combines sections, which requires sensitivity of balance. 

So how does Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2 from a relatively new, Asian orchestra sound in the context of the same symphony from one of Europe’s oldest orchestras – the performance from Pappano and the Dresden Staatskapelle referred to earlier? Perhaps the Singapore performance has more ‘gleam’ and yes, Fizz, to Dresden’s glow. This whole performance seems to be more on the front foot – a more forward sound. As for the Singapore strings, they are tighter than in Dresden, but can’t quite match the sense of soul in the German orchestra’s strings.

Not that these things dim a very impressive Rachmaninov Symphony No 2 from the Esplanade Concert Hall. We hear the composer’s trademark push and pull, the sense of an iron fist in a velvet glove – aided by gorgeously soft but edgy horns and silky strings. Perhaps more than that, the orchestra has a highly sophisticated blend (particularly noticeable in the second movement Allegro molto); a collective sense of direction and unity – hard to communicate with panache in Rachmaninoff, given the music’s undertow changes so frequently. It’s somehow different to Dresden’s ‘cloud-like’ collective sound and Berlin’s tight chamber-music approach; more contained, for want of a better word, in terms of its ensemble sound. It’s like the NHK sound, but more tangy than smooth. 

At least one critic has noted that the Singapore Symphony Orchestra plays Rachmaninov so well because it understands the composer’s sense of melancholy. Could that be an emerging hallmark of the SSO? I certainly hear it in these performances. It may be too early for this relatively young orchestra to have established a particular sound culture of its own. But won’t it be interesting to keep listening, and see where it goes?