This is PSOliloquy, a blog about the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Welcome to PSOliloquy, an independent blog where I share my thoughts on the past, present, and future of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. This is not a company blog--the PSO already has that, run by Joyce DeFrancesco. It also has a couple of other blogs to connect audiences to their tours and their concertmaster. PSOliloquy is, instead, an independent blog about a front-rank musical institution, the best arts organization in Pittsburgh and the best orchestra, in my opinion, in the United States. The extraordinary history and current standard of performance merits an outsider's dedicated, watchful, supportive, and critical commentary.
I know the PSO is the country's best orchestra because I've heard the "competition." Over the course of some eighteen months, I recently had the opportunity to hear, from west to east, the San Francisco Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, New York Phil, and Boston Symphony, each in its home hall and usually with its music director. Most of them sounded very good, but just slightly bloated or foggy--and not only in the acoustical nightmare of Avery Fisher Hall. Only San Francisco and Cleveland rivaled the PSO in sheer virtuosity, in my opinion, which is admittedly based on just a handful of live concerts. But Michael Tilson Thomas manages to take most of the musical exuberance he inspires from the SFSO and leave it on the stage of Davies Symphony Hall, his beautiful machine-like orchestra failing to inspire in a human dimension. And the Cleveland Orchestra, though luxurious, blends too homogenously for my taste, like a powder blooming in the air, spreading its sonic splendor far and wide in equal distribution, indiscriminately.
By contrast, the PSO plays like a chamber group. You can feel the musicians listening to one another. Tempi push and pull with extraordinary ensemble. The colors of the oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, and trombone don't just add to the whole, as in Cleveland, they comprise the music itself--these are individual voices with unabashed timbral differences re-creating the music as if their lives depend on it. The PSO is rarely less than exhilarating. This sound, and this orchestra, deserve not only to be applauded, but to be followed, to be thought about critically, especially as the orchestra under Manfred Honeck has undertaken a welcome renewal of creating commercial recordings--stunning recordings in every way.
PSOliloquy aims to inquire into the history and continued changes of this best symphony orchestra in America. It's not a forum for journalistic music criticism, scolding the too-loud brass or praising a visiting soloist. Rather, it's a cauldron for inquiry into the PSO's recorded history (all of which I have in my personal collection) and its tactics for surviving the trials facing classical music in these times. It's also a focus for my thoughts on the connections between music and place, between classical music culture and the culture of the Pittsburgh region. Sometimes it will be a fan blog, other times a forum promoting a different way of doing things. It is a way to reflect on music and culture at large while retaining a real-world grounding in a vital arts institution.
For full disclosure, I admit to having a few toes inside the doors of Heinz Hall. First, in my job as a musicologist at the School of Music at Carnegie Mellon University, many of my colleagues are members of the PSO. Second, I have worked ad hoc for the orchestra in the past, writing the billboard lobby copy on Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, contributing an essay on musical autobiography to a program book, giving a pre-concert talk, and sharing the Heinz Hall stage with Maestro Honeck and Joseph Horowitz during the Tchaikovsky Festival. I hope these collaborations continue and that they makes me an informed commentator, not a partial one.
PSOliloquy will, however, focus on PSO recordings past and present--its greatest legacy!--and on its role as a representative of Pittsburgh and as a barometer for the pressures of a 19th-century institution trying to adapt to the 21st century. These are fast-moving times that will require the PSO to redefine itself, as it has done several times in its history, from Archer to Herbert, from the Pittsburgh Orchestra to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, from Steinberg to Previn, and from periods of unfocused leadership to its current admirable direction under Honeck. Keeping track of the current changes will be the fun and function of writing about this most brilliant ensemble of musicians and the path they clear ahead of them. Viel Glück, PSO!
