Beethoven in America and Orchestral Rep in General

There's a heated Twitter discussion going on in which one person is saying "the repertory sucks, orchestras as organizations suck, too much Beethoven, we need more film & video game music!" and I'm asking a lot of pointed questions about that, because eliminating stale repertory composed from 1760 to 1915 and replacing it with film and video game music would certainly have an effect on the audience, but maybe not the one this individual would like. 

Before I get to the heart of this post, let me reiterate that I think that most orchestras' current repertory and seasons pretty much do suck. There is way too much reliance on the works of a few "central" (perhaps meaning mostly German) composers; way too little new/recent music; way too little music outside the "central" composers; way too little of the excellent composers deemed peripheral or "not great"; way too little music by composers who aren't white men, most of them dead. 

A broader repertory would be good in so many ways; while the occasional conductor has managed to bring the apparently-fringe into the concert hall on a regular basis, those conductors are few and far between, and tend to focus on just a few favorites. For better and for worse, as my readers already know, I'm looking at you, MTT, and your tiny number of American Mavericks.

In the middle of this, another person posted the following:

Can we talk about how the music world needs a well-played Beethoven Cycle? I'm happy to go and really hear the entire catalog by an orchestra who actually understands the power of his Music. American orchestras fall short, and that is why is irrelevant in most cases. 

I replied:

Say more about what you think American orchestras lack, and also which orchestras you mean. 

For myself, Furtwängler back from the dead might get me to a Beethoven [symphony] cycle, but not much more.

And I have gotten answers, which I'm going to summarize as follows:

1. Beethoven is overplayed, but it's not a part of US musical tradition and we can't pull it off compared to European orchestras.

2. They're often underrehearsed and misrepresented.

3. Only NYC and Philly have interesting programming around.

4. In the last couple of years, Beethoven's symphonies have become an important part of the repertoire of American orchestras, because they bring audience.

Let me start with that last item, about "the last couple of years."

American orchestras have been doing festival presentations of particular composers for decades; my first visits to Davies Symphony Hall, in January, 1981, nearly 40 years ago, were to a Mostly Mozart Festival, at which I heard Claude Frank and Lillian Kallir playing concertos. (She was better than he was, I thought at the time.) It's easy enough to check the repertory and programming of US orchestras by looking at the League of American Orchestras' annual repertory reports. These go back to 1970.

Beethoven has also been present since the very beginnings of symphonic performances in the US. The NY Philharmonic, founded in 1842, started to play Beethoven during the orchestra's first season. For perspective, remember that Beethoven had died only 15 years before and was still in living memory; his death and the composition of his last works was closer to 1842 than the premiere of Nixon in China is to 2019.

The NYPO also has a handy public database of every last work they've performed and when they have performed it. Since 1842, they've performed 149 works by Beethoven. I looked up the first five symphonies, and found the following:

Symphony No. 1: 118 performances starting in the 1854-55 season
Symphony No. 2: 155 performances starting in the 1842-43 season
Symphony No. 3: 375 performances starting in the 1842-43 season
Symphony No. 4: 122 performances starting in the 1849-50 season
Symphony No. 5: 468 performances starting in the 1842-43 season

My understanding is that in the 19th c. and well into the early 20th c., some orchestral musicians were American-born, and some were European-born. European trained musicians and conductors would have brought whatever Beethoven performance traditions existed at that time, whatever those happen to have been.

When you listen to a European orchestra playing Beethoven, you don't really know whether that orchestra's Beethoven tradition started in the 19th c., or how far it was from what the tradition was in 1890 or 1850 or 1830. We know that living players and conductors influence each other, and that the historically-informed performance movement has influenced conductors of orchestras that aren't playing on period instruments. Does anyone think Mahler's Beethoven sounded like Beethoven performances from 1815? Even bearing in mind that we have no recordings of Mahler conducting an orchestra?

We do know that there has been a great homogenization of orchestral sound and playing style since the beginning of the recording era, and especially since the end of World War II. I'm not going to go into any detail about this; read Robert Philip's extremely interesting Performing Music in the Age of Recordings for a superb analysis.

My larger point is simply that there's a long and solid tradition of playing Beethoven in the US. The traditions that developed here started not long after Beethoven's lifetime. They're just as valid as whatever the Bayerischer Rundfunk, a great orchestra, is doing. (The Bayerischer Rundfunke is also a much newer orchestra than the NYPO.) Yes, my numbers are NYPO only, but I think I can get some information about other orchestras with emails to SFS and Philly. I mean, Eugene Ormandy was the music directory at Philly for how many years? And he was trained where?

There are some traditions where I am willing to accept that the orchestras (and solo performers) that are local to a particular composer have more of a connection to a particular style. These are mostly in the Eastern European countries and Russia. Among other things, those performing groups were isolated after WWII and retained more of their early sound; Russian orchestras are still famous for the particular brass sonorities, for example. And yeah, I suspect that Hungarian performers might know something about Bartok that Americans don't, given the language and folk music of Hungary.

I did not ask about the "misrepresentation" of Beethoven by US orchestras. "Underrehearsed" - well, any orchestra can be underrehearsed, especially in music they've played a lot ("they know this so well that we don't need as much rehearsal"), but mostly I think that they are not. I can remember maybe one performance by a major orchestra where I winced at problems with the playing - messy downbeats and entries, mostly, in a work I would have thought very familiar to the particular organization. I also remember a program by a good regional orchestra where there were two biggish pieces on the program and it was very obvious which had gotten more rehearsal time. I am curious whether American orchestras, which are full of incredible players, are more likely to be underrehearsed than European orchestras. I'm not at all sure how you'd figure this out, either.

Regarding programming at US orchestras, this is all a matter of the public record. Ask any ten critics, or ask on Music Twitter, about interesting programming and every last one of us will start jumping up and down screaming LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC, with everyone else behind them. I have a public spreadsheet that happens to list the 2019-20 seasons of the San Francisco Symphony and Philly laid out by composer and work. I've even color-coded it by living/dead and male/female. Those seasons seem pretty typical to me, bearing in mind that 19-20 is Michael Tilson Thomas's last season as music director, and so we are getting a lot of MTT's greatest hits, including a couple of works he composed, Mahler, The Flying Dutchman, etc.