THERE was general surprise when, in 1990, the New York Philharmonic named Kurt Masur as its new music director. But the conductor from the former East Germany has transformed the fortunes of an orchestra, America's oldest, which has a history going back to 1842, the same year in which the Vienna Philharmonic came into being.
The New York orchestra's first concert included Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (which had been introduced to the US just a year earlier) along with, in the very mixed programming style of the time, overtures by Weber and the now long-forgotten Kalliwoda, arias by Mozart, Beethoven and Rossini, and a piano quintet by Hummel. The early seasons ran to between three and six concerts (a far cry from the current workload of around 200) and the conductors were European emigres, men whose reputations were national rather than international.
In the early years of the new century, one of the great figures of the age crossed the orchestra's path. The encounter with Gustav Mahler came at the end of the composer's life and his tenure coincided with the internal reorganisation of the orchestra on a full-time basis in 1909.
His short time with the orchestra seems to have generated friction on many fronts. The great man himself expressed his reservations to fellow-conductor Bruno Walter. "My orchestra here," he reported, "is a real American orchestra. Untalented and phlegmatic. It's uphill work".
The players were understandably unenamoured of some of Mahler's rehearsal habits. He was fond of weeding out weak players from the back desks, and forcing them to play on their own. One of these, a New York double bass player, is credited with having protested: "Why don't you ask the first flute or the first oboe to play on their own?".
"I'm afraid to take a chance on what I might hear," is Mahler's supposed response.
A greater problem than the players were the women who, as guarantors, had real power over the conductor. His widow complained that he had "ten ladies ordering him about like a puppet". The confrontations were unpleasant (one even involving a meeting with a lawyer hidden behind a curtain) and there are those who regard his difficulties with the orchestra as having hastened the composer's death. Yet Mahler seems to have left a strong impression both on his supporters ("marvellously inspired", "nothing short of sublime"), as well as on his detractors, who cavilled at his tampering with composer's texts.
The Mahler years, unfortunately, were not documented on disc, unlike those of the next great figures to take charge of the orchestra, the idiosyncratic Dutchman, Willem Mengelberg, and the fiery Italian, Arturo Toscanini.
Mengelberg, who had been appointed to Amsterdam's Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1895 at the remarkably young age of 24, tends to get overshadowed by Toscanini. Yet his 1928 recording of Strauss's Heldenleben (a work dedicated to him) shows what spectacular performing condition the orchestra had reached under his direction. And Toscanini's NYPO recordings, though small in number, are generally held in higher esteem than the later ones, made with the NBC Symphony Orchestra which had been specially created for him.
NYPO management was at this time under the control of Arthur Judson, founder of CBS and also, incredible as it may seem, holder of the orchestral reins in Philadelphia and owner of an artist management agency. The name of the great Wilhelm Furtwangler fluttered briefly, was shot down, and Judson's choice as successor to Toscanini was John Barbirolli, whose period in New York is rarely spoken about in positive terms. It was around this time than Beecham, asked by the director to diagnose the musical ills of the organisation, remarked that though it contained many excellent players it was not an orchestra.
Artur Rodzinski was brought in to put things right in 1943, and did so. "Mahler and Toscanini were greater interpreters," wrote the composer and critic Virgil Thomson, but "were not such, great builders." Rodzinski, however, fell out with Judson and, after an interregnum and a flirtation with Stokowski, the post went to the Greek, Dimitri Mitropoulos.
Mitropoulos had created a sensation with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1930, by standing in at the last minute for the indisposed soloist, Egon Petri, in a performance of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto - at the concert he played the solo part from memory as well as conducting. A mild-mannered man, Mitropoulos seemed unable to bend the New York players to his will.
Virgil Thomson had written of him in 1942: "He seems to be over-sensitive, over-weaning, over-brutal, over-intelligent, under-confident and wholly without ease. He is clearly a musician of class, nevertheless, and a coming man of some sort in the musical world". Mitropoulos was variable on the podium, and not widely regarded as reliable in mainstream music. He stayed with the Philharmonic until 1958, and left, by all accounts, a broken man, whose greatest achievements were in the more challenging repertoire of the 20th century.
THE change between Mitropoulos and his successor could hardly have been more striking. Leonard Bernstein was brash, outgoing, ebullient, a showman. He was a communicator who had made a success of a television slot for a series of lectures on music. He had a track record as a composer for the Broadway musical theatre. He, too, could combine piano playing and conducting. And he was the first American-born conductor to rise to the musical directorship of a major American orchestra. The larger-than-life aspects of Bernstein's music-making inevitably raised questions (they still do).
But his work had enormous vitality and he captured the imagination of the public. It was a token of his success with an orchestra not renowned for long-term relationships, that when he resigned his post in 1969 he was given the title Laureate Conductor for life.
The New York orchestra's penchant for the unexpected in conductors revealed itself again in the choice of Pierre Boulez, long a leading composer of the avantgarde, and a man whose favoured musical repertoire extended from Mahler into the post-romantic music of the 20th-century. Boulez's explorations, which included reaching out to new audiences in new venues and "rug concerts" with the seating removed from the floor of the Avery Fisher Hall, were well regarded, and had a predictable impact on the age-profile of the orchestra's audience.
When Boulez moved on in 1977 to the lavishly funded IRCAM research and performance institute in Paris, his successor, Zubin Mehta, moved the orchestra back into safer and cosier territory. The orchestra's reputation and recording career suffered, and, since the New York Philharmonic had taken over its most serious competitors way back in the 1920s (for a while after absorbing the New York Symphony it was cumbersomely known as the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra) there was no serious competition to keep it on its toes.
The arrival in the 1990s of Kurt Masur, and a new, female-dominated management team under Deborah Borda, was to change all that. A special committee was set up to resolve grievances (including some against Masur). A new union contract was negotiated, bringing the musicians a minimum of over $80.000 a year. The conductor appeared at public question-and-answer sessions called Philharmonic Forums. Hour-long Rush-Hour Concerts were introduced, with attendance figures of 99 per cent, and a high conversion rate into the regular subscription series.
Masur set about transforming the orchestra's musical standards with a success which, in the words of Musical America, amounted to a "thorough makeover". The makeover was successful enough for Musical America to nominate Masur Musician of the Year in 1993.
Masur was not new to orchestral transformation. He took charge of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra - with a tradition far older and far more distinguished than that of New York - in 1970. The pre-war eminence of the Leipzig orchestra (when its conductors had included Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwangler and Bruno Walter) had been allowed to slip, even to the point of its being described as a provincial, East German ensemble with a glorious history.
The musical world was soon made aware of Masur's musical reforms through his recordings of Mendelssohn, one of his distinguished predecessors at the orchestra's helm. The gloss returned to an orchestra which employed a total of around 200 musicians, who worked in factories, in churches, formed three chamber orchestras, nine string quartets, and numerous other ensembles. In the mid-1970s Masur cemented his growing reputation with a recorded Beethoven cycle praised for the discipline of the playing and the centrality of interpretative approach.
Masur was not found wanting in his country's time of need. With Leipzig at the forefront of protest in the declining days of the German Democratic Republic, he found himself cast in the role of negotiator and peace-maker, working to avoid public bloodshed. In the period before re-unification, he was even spoken of as a possible presidential candidate in East Germany.
He now finds himself living through an unusual duality. German re-unification has been particularly hard on cultural institutions in the East, where comfortable state subsidies and protection from the rival attractions of Western-style media have been rudely swept away. His Leipzig orchestra is no more immune to these developments than any other.
IN NEW York, on the other hand, he landed into an orchestra where a feeling of security seems to have led to a form of musical complacency. He has been credited with bringing new vitality to its playing, an added lustre to its tone.
The opening of a 1993 review in Gramophone magazine is typical: "Refinement is not a quality which one normally associates with the New York Philharmonic, even though it has been one of America's leading orchestras for many decades. Yet here under the influence of a German musician who has been the orchestra's Music Director for two seasons, it produces a notably beautiful quality of playing."
Masur demurs at the idea that the tonal changes might be personal to him. His goal, he says, is meaningful playing - he only wants to bring to each work what it needs. Tomorrow, in his and the orchestra's Dublin debut, that's what you can expect to hear him doing in Ned Rorem's Cor anglais Concerto and Bruckner's Fourth Symphony.
