Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia Box Set

For most of my youth in Philadelphia, I was well aware of the Philadelphia Orchestra and its Chief Conductor Eugene Ormandy. However, even though my attendance of concerts at the Academy of Music was limited, I quickly became aware of Concertmaster Anshel Brusilow, since he ran a local television of program, which he used to interview individual musicians (most of them from the Philadelphia Orchestra) about their work. Brusilow clearly had aspirations beyond the position of concertmaster; and, in 1961, he recruited several of the Philadelphia Orchestra musicians to form the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, which he then directed.

Cover of the box set being discussed (courtesy of Jensen Artists)

Unfortunately, this group had to disband in 1964 when the Orchestra Association put a stop to its members forming and playing in independent musical groups. The following year Brusilow founded the Chamber Symphony of Philadelphia, which had its own concert seasons until 1968, when it had to fold due to financial problems. However, between 1965 and 1968, RCA Victor recorded and released six albums; and these are now available as a Sony Classical box set.

Each of the albums focused on a particular aspect of music history. The “topics” of those aspects were (in roughly historical order) as follows:

• Joseph Haydn and Luigi Cherubini
• Johannes Brahms
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Anton Arensky
• Richard Strauss and Hugo Wolf
• Maurice Ravel, Jean Françaix, and Jacques Ibert
• Richard Yardumian

The last of these involved the premiere performance and recoding of Come, Creator Spirit, subtitled “A New Mass in English.” Ormandy had championed Yardumian’s work and may well have encouraged Brusilow to take on this particular premiere, which was scored for mezzo, chorus, and a chamber-scaled orchestra.

I am almost certain that I have heard nothing of Yardumian since my student days, and I have to confess that his CD had little impact on my now heavily-matured listening skills. However, for the most part, the remaining five CDs are highly satisfying, making a strong case for an approach to performance that was almost entirely ignored during the Sixties. Indeed, in retrospect it is pleasant to know that there was at least one conductor willing to take Haydn on his own terms before the rise of “historically informed performance.” Indeed, Leonard Slatkin’s current approach to Haydn is very much a reflection of Brusilow’s recording (even if the latter was not aware of the former).

One of my favorite selections in the collection is the Brahms CD, which is devoted entirely to an early orchestral composition, the Opus 11 serenade in D major. I had a hard time with this piece when I played in a community orchestra during my student days. The music was composed for an A clarinet, and I only had a B-flat. Both transposing and playing were more than a modest strain. However, once I came to know how the Opus 11 should be played, it has become a delight. (My most recent encounter was in November of last year, when Michael Tilson Thomas led the San Francisco Symphony in an all-Brahms program.) I also appreciated Brusilow’s thorough account of Strauss’ Opus 60, the complete incidental music he composed for Molière’s play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, which sometimes serves as a prologue for the one-act opera “Ariadne auf Naxos.”

Taken as a whole, this collection now serves as a time machine; but these recordings make the case that this was a time worth revisiting.