Philadelphia Orchestra
The Philadelphia Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra, based in Philadelphia. One of the "Big Five" American orchestras, the orchestra is based at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, where it performs its subscription concerts, numbering over 130 annually, at Verizon Hall.
Philadelphia Orchestra
From its founding until 2001, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its concerts at the Academy of Music. The orchestra continues to own the Academy, and returns there one week per year for the Academy of Music's annual gala concert and concerts for school children. The Philadelphia Orchestra's summer home is the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. It also has summer residencies at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, and since July 2007 at the Bravo! Vail Valley Festival in Vail, Colorado. The orchestra also performs an annual series of concerts at Carnegie Hall. From its earliest days the orchestra has been active in the recording studio, making extensive numbers of recordings, primarily for RCA Victor and Columbia Records.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin has been serving as the orchestra's music director since 2012. Matías Tarnopolsky was appointed president and CEO in August 2018.[1]
Recordings[edit]
The Orchestra's first recordings were made for the Victor Talking Machine Company in Camden, New Jersey, in 1917, when Leopold Stokowski conducted performances of two of Brahms's Hungarian Dances. The historic first electrical recordings were also made at Victor's Trinity Church Studio in Camden, in April 1925; Saint-Saëns' Danse macabre was the first to be recorded. Later, in 1926, Victor began recording the Orchestra in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. Stokowski led the ensemble in experimental long-playing, high-fidelity, and even stereophonic sessions in the early 1930s for RCA Victor and Bell Laboratories. During 1939–40, Stokowski and the orchestra recorded the soundtrack for Walt Disney's Fantasia in multi-track stereophonic sound.
Arturo Toscanini made a series of recordings for RCA Victor with the orchestra in 1941 and 1942; the master discs for these records were supposedly damaged during processing, resulting in unusually high surface noise and distortion and they were not approved for release at the time. In 1963, after extensive electronic editing, RCA Victor issued one of the recordings on LP, the Schubert Symphony in C Major. In 1977, all of the recordings were finally issued in a 5 LP boxed set; they were later digitally remastered and reissued twice on compact disc by RCA Victor in 1992 and again in 2006.
During the 1942–44 AFM Recording Ban, the orchestra's contract with RCA Victor expired; following the settlement of the strike in November, 1944, the orchestra joined Columbia Records, recording some of the dances from Borodin's Prince Igor. The Philadelphians remained with Columbia for the next 23 years. In 1968, Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra returned to RCA Victor and made their first digital recording, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra, for the label in 1979. The Orchestra has also recorded for EMI and Teldec.
From 1935 to 1976 The Philadelphia Orchestra performed as The Robin Hood Dell Orchestra for a summer concert series held at Robin Hood Dell, an outdoor stage in Fairmount Park.[61][62] Close to 50 recordings were released under The Robin Hood Dell Orchestra name.
In May 2005, the Philadelphia Orchestra announced a three-year recording partnership with the Finnish label Ondine, the Orchestra's first recording contract in 10 years. The resumption of a regular recording program was one of Christoph Eschenbach's stated priorities as music director. A number of recordings have been released since November 2005, to international acclaim.
On September 21, 2006, the Philadelphia Orchestra became the first major United States orchestra to sell downloads of its performances directly from the orchestra's website. While other American orchestras had downloads of their music on the internet, the Philadelphia Orchestra said it was the first to offer the downloads without a distributor.[46] In 2010, the orchestra abandoned this practice and formed a partnership with IODA, a digital distribution company with downloads available through a variety of online retailers, including iTunes, Amazon.com, Rhapsody, and eMusic.
In other media, musicians from the orchestra were featured in a documentary film by Daniel Anker, Music from the Inside Out, which received theatrical release and television airings.[63][64]
The orchestra received its first Grammy Award in 2022, for their recording of the first and third symphonies of Florence Price.[43]
Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Saratoga Springs, New York, the orchestra's summer residency since the venue first opened in 1966.
