by Herbert Kupferberg

History sometimes has a way not only of repeating but of reversing itself. In 1943 the Philadelphia Orchestra, having recorded since its earliest days exclusively for RCA Victor, startled the record world by shifting its allegiance to Columbia. Now, twenty-five years later, after building up for Columbia a record library unparalleled in size and variety by any other American orchestra, the Philadelphia has once again flipped its affiliation by returning, with considerable flourish and fanfare, to RCA.

Recording contracts have, of course, long been a major factor in the financial as well as the musical life of most major orchestras. To put the matter in its most crassly commercial terms, record royalties have been bringing the Philadelphia Orchestra a minimum of $250,000 annually during recent years; in addition, records have helped spread the orchestra’s reputation and sound well beyond its home city, thus creating prospective audiences for tour visits. Recordings also mean money to the players; under the current contract each member is guaranteed a minimum of $2000 a year in recording fees, and some make substantially more.

Philadelphia recordings go back to 1917, when Stokowski led the orchestra across the Delaware River to Camden, New Jersey, to enregister Brahms’s Hungarian Dances Nos. 5 and 6; ten years later the orchestra made the first Victor “album" ever issued, a five-record 78 rpm set of Dvorák’s New World Symphony which bore the designation “M-1.” The orchestra left Victor in 1943 simply because it felt that it had been relegated by the company to the No. 3 position, behind Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony and Toscanini’s NBC Symphony, which were grabbing off the choice repertory. Columbia quickly made the Philadelphia, under Eugene Ormandy, its No. 1 orchestra. Ironically for RCA Victor, the Boston dwindled in its appeal to record collectors after the death of Koussevitzky in 1951, and the NBC went out of business altogether with the death of Toscanini a few years later. The result has been that while RCA has retained its leading position in operatic recording, Columbia has dominated the symphonic picture in this country, issuing the recordings of the Cleveland and the New York Philharmonic in addition to the Philadelphia.

RCA is now out to change all that, with company officials regarding the reacquisition of the Philadelphia as one of their greatest coups in years. It also was one of their most expensive, for under a five-year contract the orchestra will receive a minimum guarantee of $2 million which at $400,000 a year probably represents the most lucrative recording arrangement any orchestra has ever had.

Although some Columbia officials publicly took the attitude that the orchestra had recorded just about all there was to record in its twentyfive years with the company, there were others who were quite obviously chagrined over the loss of the Philadelphia. Perhaps the best indication of Columbia’s feelings was the furious pace at which it began to record the orchestra in the weeks before its contract ran out on May 15, 1968. Literally dozens of recordings were completed, all to be put “in the can" for release by Columbia after the affiliation with RCA began. Upon learning that one of the first RCA-Philadelphia new releases was to be a new version by Ormandy of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, Columbia even went to the unusual length of rereleasing, in a new jacket, a recording of the Pathétique made by Ormandy and the orchestra back in i960. It this is confusing to the consumer, that undoubtedly was the intention. In the battle of new releases shaping up between RCA and Columbia, the only sure winner is the orchestra, which for months and possibly years ahead is assured of a double stream of royalty payments.

Nevertheless, officials of the Philadelphia Orchestra Association insist that their motivation in making the change was artistic no less than economic. C. Wanton Balis, Jr., an insurance executive who was president of the board of directors when the move was made (he has since become board chairman, being succeeded as president by Wanamaker’s executive Richard C. Bond), says that the board wasn’t altogether happy over some of the repertory selected by Columbia for recording. Two of the orchestra’s biggest sellers (both made with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of Salt Lake City) were entitled The Lord’s Prayer and The Glorious Sound of Christmas. Both racked up more than a million dollars in sales, and thus received the highest accolade the Record Industry Association of America sees fit to bestow, a gold-plated “Grammy.” Naturally, both records also contributed appreciably to the orchestra’s royalties. But Balis says he wasn’t really impressed. “RCA,”he told me, “simply offered us the opportunity to produce a more distinguished catalogue, rather than putting out what we call junk. We didn’t create a distinguished orchestra in Philadelphia to produce Träumerei.”

It should not be inferred from this, however, that the Philadelphia is about to give up making records of lighter music. RCA plans to issue a new line by the same musicians playing under the name of the Philadelphia Pops Orchestra, with conductors such as Henry Mancini, the Hollywood movie maestro.

In the meantime, RCA has released its first six Philadelphia Orchestra recordings, 1969 vintage. They illustrate the range and quality of the orchestra, but also the problem of repertory which RCA officials are going to confront in the five years to come. In addition to the aforementioned Pathétique Symphony (LSC-3058), they include Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor and Grand Fantasy on Polish Airs with Artur Rubinstein as soloist (LSC-3055); the Grieg A Minor and Liszt E-flat piano concertos with Van Cliburn (LSC-3065); Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E in its original version (LSC-3059); Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 3 and William Schuman’s New England Triptych (LSC3060) ; and four concertos by Telemann featuring such first-chair players as Norman Carol, violin, Samuel Mayes, cello, John de Lancie, oboe, and Mason Jones, horn, in solo roles (LSC-3057). Purchasers of these albums also receive a bonus record containing an interview with Ormandy and excerpts from some of the ancient Philadelphia-Victor recordings with such soloists as Flagstad, Feuermann, and Kreisler.

As the list makes obvious, one of the benefits of the shift to RCA is that the Philadelphia Orchestra can now record with soloists previously denied to it, such as Rubinstein and Cliburn, both of whom are exclusive RCA artists. In fact, there’s nothing RCA would like better than to get the orchestra together with Jascha Heifetz for some violin concertos, although considering how little Heifetz likes to travel these days, it may be simpler, if not cheaper, to transport the orchestra to California, his present base, than to bring him east to Philadelphia.

However, Ormandy did not move over to RCA to provide orchestral backgrounds for Heifetz, Rubinstein, or anybody else. Although he is a prince of accompanists and an obliging colleague, he is second to no one in his familiarity with and versatility in the entire orchestral repertory. In recent months, Ormandy has shown far more adventurousness and inquisitiveness in his programming than has been observable in Philadelphia in many years. The orchestra’s current season, both at the Academy of Music and Philharmonic Hall, has been dotted with such names as Ginastera, Henze, Penderecki, and Takemitsu. The Philadelphians have a good deal of catching up to do on recent developments in music, but at least they are on the move, and for next year Penderecki has given them the premiere of his new Slavic Mass, a major work. Ormandy has every intention of leaving his own stamp upon the Philadelphia-RCA catalogue, but it remains a fact that most of the standard orchestra repertory pieces he has already recorded for Columbia. It should be interesting to see what repertory he and RCA will manage to come up with in the months ahead.

Already one major change has been made in the orchestra’s recording procedures, for except for the Van Cliburn concertos which were recorded last summer at Saratoga Springs, New York, during the festival there, all the RCA sessions were held in the Academy of Music, the hundred-and-eleven-year-old hall where the Philadelphians have always given their concerts. Although the Academy’s acoustics were usually regarded as a model of excellence, Columbia’s engineers had complained of a dryness of sound for recording purposes. Accordingly, since 1956 Columbia made most of its Philadelphia recordings in a kind of union and social hall called Town Hall on North Broad Street. What there is about old union halls that appeals to recording engineers is a subject for some future doctoral dissertation; in New York City two similar locales, Manhattan Center and Webster Hall, serve a similar purpose.

In any case, RCA officials, while acknowledging that a recording problem existed at the Academy, said that a way had been found to overcome it through development of a device to enhance the reverberation qualities of the hall. Ormandy himself, hearing the results, is alleged to have said: “Town Hall was a great hi-fi studio, but this sounds like a concert hall.”

Future releases will provide plenty of opportunity to compare the sound of the Philadelphia Orchestra in both locales. The initial RCA releases do seem somewhat less lush in sound than the older Columbia’s, and the recording level selected by the engineers also appears just a bit lower. But these may turn out to be virtues rather than detriments; the last thing the opulent Philadelphia strings needed was to have their lushness highlighted in recordings. In the new RCA releases, the Philadelphia emerges as a beautifully balanced orchestra, with its choirs shining forth individually, yet blending into a homogeneous whole. It is a sound that is clean and clear and with a recognizably Philadelphia sonority. RCA executives are certain to be watching anxiously over that sound as future recording sessions roll round.