Do the "Big Five" US Orchestras Still Reign Supreme?

Once upon a time, American orchestras divided themselves into two groups: the so-called ‘Big Five’, and all the rest. 

It was a little like the creation of the Premier League in football, though less formal, not quite so meritocratic and highly skewed to one geographical area.  

The Big Five certainly deserved their elite status. These orchestras were the most technically excellent, frequently-recorded, well-paying and generally admired in the USA. They were – and still are – the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra. When the label was first used in the 1950s, all five orchestras presented regular concert series in New York (one reason for the eastern seaboard bias).  

The Big Five idea was dreamed-up partly to help put the American orchestra scene on the world map – to present a unified counterpart to the great ‘Philharmonic’ orchestras of central Europe. It was also intended to signal to young musicians where they would find the most lucrative employment.

Who are the Big Five?

The New York Philharmonic

Given the focus on New York, the city’s own Philharmonic is often the first of the Big Five to be cited. 

The New York Philharmonic is the oldest orchestra in America; it was established in 1842, before its counterpart in Vienna. Looking at its history, it can seem like the New York Philharmonic has oscillated between hiring music directors who have focused on technical refinement and those who have got the orchestra to play ‘from the heart’ (most famously, in the latter case, Leonard Bernstein, whose successor was Pierre Boulez). 

Perhaps that lies behind the orchestra’s distinctive sense of attack, its astonishing agility, the machine-like precision of its strings and its propensity towards a heavy sound that never cloys. 

Alan Gilbert, music director from 2009-17, was said by local critics to have tamed the Phil’s sometimes raucous sound – rounding and smoothening it, without reducing its power. Here (video below), New Yorker Gilbert conducts Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. After the brief, Covid-rocked tenure of Jaap van Zweden, the New York Philharmonic is soon to welcome Gustavo Dudamel as music director. Is a new golden age on the way?

The Philadelphia Orchestra

The strings of The Philadelphia Orchestra are even more distinctive than those in New York. That goes all the way back to former music director Leopold Stokowski, who encouraged strings to play out and instigated ‘free bowing’, in which string players move the bow according to individual will rather than pre-determined markings. Both were designed to help primitive recording technology better capture their sound. 

Eugene Ormandy brought a little more discipline to the power instigated by Stokowski. The orchestra’s current music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin once told me that his orchestra plays with ‘a generous sound’ that aims to sustain the line – a quality previously observed in the orchestra by one of its biggest fans, Sergei Rachmaninoff. 

This all-Brahms concert (below) from principal guest conductor Nathalie Stutzman at the Kimmel Center shows many of those qualities but also what a limpid cushion of sound it can provide underneath the composer’s Violin Concerto, played with remarkable poise by Gil Shaham. 

The Cleveland Orchestra

The Cleveland Orchestra, founded in 1918, is the youngest of the Big Five. Even so, it was once described by a critic as the ‘best orchestra in America no matter who is conducting it.’ Only three musicians have held the post of music director since the great George Szell (1946-70) put the orchestra on the map by establishing its extreme self-discipline. 

That has since evolved into something more limpid and delicate – a more French sound, perhaps, founded on rhythmic and dynamic flexibility and with an extreme sensitivity to colour, a good match for the detailed art-deco and Egyptian revival architecture of its beautiful home, Severance Hall. 

This concert (below) under current music director, Austrian Franz Welser-Möst, recorded at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, allows that colouristic sensitivity and delicacy to blossom, particularly in songs by Gustav Mahler, sung by Simon Keenlyside.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is considered by some the most European of America’s orchestras; it was founded along the lines of ‘elitism for all’ with low ticket prices and a determination to be open to all citizens. But the label is also connected to its sound – the voluminous quality of its string playing and its tendency towards ‘sotto voce’ playing with an alluring sheen. 

Erich Leinsdorf, music director from 1962-69, presides over this concert from Symphony Hall in Boston. It opens with a performance of Schubert’s Great C major Symphony in which the orchestra’s inbuilt lyricism combines with the conductor’s stern ideas about tempo and gear-changes. The result is thrilling – counterintuitively, perhaps, given Leinsdorf’s droll podium manner. To this day, the BSO sounds similar – an orchestra unconvinced by interpretative gimmickry but usually able to produce something distinctive.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra

No two Big Five orchestras are stylistically further apart than the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The latter was founded a decade after its Massachusetts counterpart, in 1891, and is still associated with the cut-and-thrust playing style instilled in it by Fritz Reiner and its prowess in large scale, ‘storytelling’ orchestral works.

Central to that are the much-lauded CSO brass and the wider orchestra’s expressive way with phraseology and emotional nuance. That’s one reason why the maestro with a singular ability to extract the dramatic from musicians, Georg Solti, was such a good fit as the CSO’s music director from 1969-91. 

At this concert (below) recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall in London at the end of a long European tour in 1985, the orchestra shows its fundamental strengths under Solti in Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 4. The brass sound magnificent, like gleaming towers, but the woodwinds aren’t exactly shrinking violets. The symphony’s climaxes carry huge emotional weight.

Still ‘Big’ Enough?

None of the Big Five orchestras has lost its reputation for excellence, even if each has had its ups and downs over the last 75 years. 

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra nearly closed in 2019 after an acrimonious strike, only resolved by the intervention of the city’s mayor. 

The Boston Symphony Orchestra was subjected to fierce criticism in the early years of Seiji Ozawa’s music directorship and the New York Philharmonic has had a rapid turnover of music directors recently, a situation that it’s hoped will be stabilized by Dudamel’s tenure. 

All of them, however, are modern symphony orchestras that have ‘got with the programme’ of innovation and flexibility – not just of sound, but of operations and reach. 

The trouble with the Big Five label is that plenty of other orchestras across America have done the same. Playing standards have risen across the board – particularly among very good second-tier orchestras where there was room for improvement. 

The context has also changed – and in so many ways. 

The Big Five used to be able to attract the best players, partly with promises of lucrative recordings. That is frequently no longer the case. 

Young musicians seeking work also use different parameters now and have different priorities. Outstanding musicians who might once have wanted to ‘upgrade’ from a Seattle Symphony to a New York Philharmonic might now choose to stay put for a better quality of family life – bringing a huge benefit to the former orchestra, which can attract and keep better players. Musicians might favour the stable climate of San Francisco or Los Angeles over that of Philadelphia or Boston. 

Besides, it’s arguably the Californian orchestras – the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in particular – that have shown how powerful American symphony orchestras can be in the twenty-first century. 

The LA Phil has proved that an orchestra can only have international clout if it has local relevance. The LA Phil thinks deeply about the demographics of the city in which it exists and has actively cultivated a wider, more contemporary repertoire. 

As the LA Times critic Mark Swed wrote in relation to questions surrounding the Big Five, the term has lost its meaning because ‘the real [orchestral] scene has no centre.’

In other words, the best orchestras shouldn’t be comparable with one another, because each should be individual – and not just in terms of sound. The ecosystem is, more than ever, just that – an ecosystem, not a pyramid. 

You might argue that the Big Five label was more damaging than beneficial for American classical music in broad terms. What does it do for the wider population of a huge country, to focus all domestic and international attention on a tiny handful of orchestras that are all, by their geographical nature, a very long way from the vast majority of citizens? That’s before you consider the complacency it arguably engendered in the Big Five orchestras themselves.

Perhaps the Big Five label is still helpful in denoting the orchestras with the proudest legacies. But there are arguably around 15 (at least) orchestras in the USA that can play at a high international level and might well be unbeatable in a particular area of specialist repertoire. 

That depends on a definable bedrock of quality and then the indefinable addition of magic, atmosphere, the ‘moment’ a performance takes off. 

Plenty of us will have seen dull concerts from Big Five orchestras now and then, just as we’ve seen dull concerts from the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics – and outstanding, unforgettable concerts from orchestras in Kansas City, Toulouse or Trondheim.

The Challengers

Perhaps this is a good rule of thumb: the best orchestra is your local orchestra, on a good night, with a capable and inspired conductor. 

The exciting truth is that rising orchestral standards across the world mean you can never really tell where the next outstanding performance will come from – live in the concert hall or on medici.tv. 

Still, there are orchestras in the USA who can easily challenge the supremacy of the Big Five, thanks to playing standards, sound traditions and their general attitude to creativity. Perhaps the most obvious is the LA Phil, which now also resides in what is probably the nation’s best concert hall. 

The Los Angeles Philharmonic

In 2019, the orchestra celebrated its centenary with this concert (below) featuring its three most recent music directors – Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen and Zubin Mehta. At the end of the concert, all three conduct the orchestra at the same time in a beautiful piece written for the occasion by the Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason, From Space I Saw the Earth. 

Seeing the orchestra in its gorgeous home, with its diverse audience, playing a varied menu of interesting music with such finesse, it’s hard not to conclude that this orchestra has got a lot right.  

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra

The finest live performance I’ve seen from an American orchestra was given by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms in 2011. Sure, the Proms brings out the best in orchestras but this performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 5 under Manfred Honeck was mighty, and the sound of the Pittsburgh brass is every bit as distinctive as their counterparts in Chicago. 

Listen to this performance of the Andante cantabile from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No 5 (below)) – given under Honeck in memory of the orchestra’s former music director, Mariss Jansons – and tell me that this orchestra isn’t up there with the best.

Minnesota, Utah, Oregon, Cincinnati, Altanta and Dallas orchestras

In 2010, the critic Alex Ross claimed the Minnesota Orchestra had sounded to him, in a concert at Carnegie Hall, like ‘the greatest orchestra in the world.’ It had swung by London the year earlier, and I’d caught it at the Barbican under Osmo Vänskä. Crikey, it sounded good. 

I’ve been seriously impressed with other American orchestras – and in different ways. The Utah Symphony surely has the best programme notes of any. The Oregon Symphony is experimenting with a fascinating breadth of repertoire. The Cincinnati Symphony is having a renaissance in its newly refurbished concert hall and I’ve been consistently impressed with the up-and-coming Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, after twenty strong years under Robert Spano enjoying the new musical leadership of Nathalie Stutzman.

And then there’s the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, a regular broadcaster on Medici TV now in its fifth year under music director Fabio Luisi – a technical conductor who is remarkably adept at cleaning-up orchestral sound and fostering deep sensitivity and listening in large ensembles. Just listen to how supple the Dallas players sound in these performances of music by Rachmaninoff and Strauss. Certainly, Dallas is an orchestra to watch (or hear):

So should we stop thinking about a Big Five, and think of a Big Ten or Big Fifteen instead? 

Maybe the hierarchies of reputation, which can always change, should take precedent over any fixed list. If the Big Five are being challenged, it’s not because their standards have slipped. It’s because other orchestras have got very, very good – and because the parameters by which we judge such things have changed.