As Symphonies Set in the East...

The Boston Symphony has just released its first set of historical recordings, a 12-CD package of outstanding performances from the past 58 years. The New York Philharmonic has just paid tribute to its last decade under Kurt Masur in a 10-CD set with many happy surprises from a conductor with a reputation for being a stern interpreter.

On Saturday, the Philadelphia Orchestra will move into its new home in the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, its Verizon Hall as long awaited--and as desperately needed--as Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

The Chicago Symphony has a new CD release. It looks impressive, with photos of looming Modernist Chicago architecture on the cover; it sounds impressive, with the orchestra in altogether sumptuous form under its music director, Daniel Barenboim; and it includes the first recording of an important new piece by Pierre Boulez. The Cleveland Orchestra also has a new CD, a live concert in Tokyo led by George Szell in 1970 that is highlighted by a staggering performance of Sibelius’ Second Symphony.

While several North American orchestras are in crisis--San Jose has canceled its season, Toronto and St. Louis have come perilously close to bankruptcy--things might appear to be looking pretty good for those bands that had traditionally been called the “Big Five.”

The reality, however, is that these east-of-the-Mississippi orchestras are limping rather than leaping into the 21st century. They are no longer the biggest bands in America (Los Angeles is second in budget to Boston), nor are they automatically the best on any given night. Still, provincialism dies hard, and the term continues to show up on occasion in East Coast and British publications.

Not one of these ensembles has been able to retain a recording contract with its current music director. Boston, Philadelphia, New York and Cleveland lost theirs years ago (the historical recordings are self-produced). Chicago is the latest statistic: The new Teldec release was recorded last year before the label dropped the orchestra. The Chicago symphony also cannot find sponsorship for its radio broadcasts and has made its first excursion into the red in 15 years, recently posting a $1.3-million deficit.

New York, Philadelphia and Cleveland have long been laboring under competent but often quite dull aging German music directors; Boston’s reputation has declined significantly after nearly three decades under Seiji Ozawa. At times, there seems so little life or imagination in these institutions that they might better be called the Old Five.

Change is, however, in the works. Four of the orchestras are in optimistic transition, with new music directors arriving in the next few years. James Levine, one of America’s most important conductors, is the inspired choice for Boston; the cosmopolitan and intensely musical Christoph Eschenbach heads for Philadelphia; Lorin Maazel, a technical wizard, will mean New York is in the hands of an American for the first time since Bernstein resigned in 1969. Next year, the Cleveland Orchestra entrusts itself to a fine young Austrian conductor, Franz Welser-Most.

In the absence of gross administrative incompetence, these orchestras will be better off under their new men. (You don’t think, do you, that any seriously considered a woman?) But as well as the searches turned out, they were handled so badly that the orchestras continue to project sorry images, to send out just the kinds of signals that classical music doesn’t need.

Boston is the most worrisome. Its recent decision to cancel John Adams’ “Klinghoffer” Choruses is altogether shocking. Although management explained that it decided to “err on the side of being sensitive,” the decision implies that Bostonians find that classical music is not the proper place to consider the most immediate issues of our day. While bending over backward to express its belief in Adams’ work--which is taken from his opera “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and is a meditation on the causes and effects of terrorism--the orchestra is telling us that classical performers are overly “sensitive” to the point of unprofessionalism, and that even Boston’s famously intelligent audiences deserve nothing more than escape or maybe a snooze.

Even Boston’s new CD set, “Symphony Hall Centennial Celebration,” taken from its broadcast archives, is evidence of an orchestra with a major image problem. The set will be welcomed under Christmas trees for the quality of its performances, but it nonetheless reeks of cautious gentility, of selection by committee that is uncomfortable with classical music as a living, messy, pertinent art.

It contains historical evidence of some of the orchestra’s triumphs--Serge Koussevitzky conducting the world premieres of Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra in 1944 and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 (“The Age of Anxiety”), with the composer at the piano, in 1949. Previous music directors Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf and William Steinberg are represented at their best. Ozawa too comes off sounding good in his most sympathetic repertory, especially Messiaen and Stravinsky. A host of guest conductors--from Bruno Walter and Dimitri Mitropoulos to a very young Michael Tilson Thomas--make notable appearances. The orchestra plays with tremendous richness and verve most of the time.

But there is little of musical substance, given this orchestra’s important role in American music. Second-level composers such as Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss and Bartok are predominant, and there are surprisingly few major works throughout. Despite his lifelong relationship with the orchestra, Bernstein is not heard conducting except in a short excerpt from a rehearsal of Messiaen’s “Turangalila” Symphony. Levine is not represented. Nor is there any indication that this orchestra has commissioned and premiered important American works by John Cage, Peter Lieberson or John Harbison in the half-century since Bernstein’s symphony.

Ozawa comes to the end of his tenure with the orchestra this spring; Levine begins in 2004. For three years, vision-free Boston will drift without a music director, ruled instead by the relevancy police of the current “Klinghoffer”-canceling administration.

Ironically, the Boston appointment is the only one of the four music director searches without some sort of controversy. Although New York and Philadelphia publicly fought over the same candidates for a while, New York finally went with a dark horse, Lorin Maazel, who before the search hadn’t conducted the orchestra in many years. The New York press has been merciless in dissing the choice, questioning whether the Maazel appointment is merely one out-of-touch old man stepping in for another. That may be the case, and the orchestra acted with such a sense of desperation that it did little to counter that suspicion. But it does present a different picture with its CD set, “Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic.”

Having sat through any number of sincere but prosaic performances by Masur and the New Yorkers, I must say that I did not look forward to spending another 15 or so hours with this maestro. But the sheer amount of substance to be found on these discs is so extraordinary that whatever is missing in terms of color or sensuality is easily overlooked. Here, indeed, is the profundity that is in such short supply in the Boston set.

What is most notable is Masur’s facing head-on some of the most seriously impressive music ever written: Included are the Bach “St. Matthew” Passion, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and his Ninth Symphony.

There is also substantive new music by Hans Werner Henze, Giya Kancheli, Sophia Gubaidulina and Tan Dun, all profound pieces (the last three are Masur commissions).

The kicker, though, is the inclusion of the three genre-breaking, music-theater-dance pieces commissioned by Ballets Russes dancer-turned-flamboyant actress Ida Rubinstein--Debussy’s “Martyrdom of St. Sebastian,” Stravinsky’s “Persephone” and Honegger’s “Joan of Arc at the Stake.” With exceptionally fine playing throughout, Masur’s stiffness is never more than a minor annoyance.

Yet the fact that this set comes as such an important surprise only exemplifies just how much this orchestra has to overcome in its image, which means that Maazel, who begins next season, has his work cut out for him.

But at least the New York musicians want Maazel. In Philadelphia, the musicians face an arranged marriage. Eschenbach was selected in such a panic-induced haste--Philadelphia feared New York would snag him--that he was hired without having conducted the orchestra in five years and over objections from a majority of the players who wanted a chance to work with him before any decision was made.

That was nearly a year ago, and he still hasn’t conducted the ensemble he will head in 2003. If Philadelphians want to hear their music director designate Saturday, the day of the orchestra’s first concert in its new hall, they can tune their radios to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast in which Eschenbach will be conducting “Arabella.” That is not a very promising symbol for the orchestra.

Welser-Most comes into Cleveland next season with question marks, a conductor full of promise but still growing. Again, there is at least the appearance of an orchestra acting in haste. Remember when former Los Angeles Philharmonic managing director Willem Wijnbergen announced that Clevelanders had been lurking about the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to check out Esa-Pekka Salonen, but that L.A.’s music director had turned them down? It wasn’t long after that Cleveland made its surprise announcement. Meanwhile, the orchestra is commemorating the final season of Christoph von Dohnanyi with the CD release of not him but the incomparable Szell. Dohnanyi ends his 16 years with the orchestra in the spring with a concert performance of Wagner’s “Siegfried,” a reminder of the music director’s failed attempt to record the complete “Ring” cycle with Cleveland (a project dropped after the first two operas lighted too few fires with the public).

In Chicago, the orchestra has in Barenboim a conductor of far more depth than it had in its previous and hugely popular music director, Georg Solti. Programming is actually more substantial, and the orchestra, unlike the other four, has a composer-in-residence, Shalumit Ran. Although the orchestra’s budget problems are not expected to have a long-lasting effect (Los Angeles has just been working out of a larger deficit), one wonders whether they are, in part, due to the simple lack of sizzle Barenboim has generated.

The obvious contrast for the Old Five is with the West Coast’s New Two. Esa-Pekka Salonen and Michael Tilson Thomas have made the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony the country’s hot orchestras. The Philharmonic’s latest CD is of Salonen conducting his own music, and it has been receiving rave reviews in the international press. When Vanity Fair wanted to photograph a couple of maestros for its recent music issue, it asked Salonen and MTT to pose together, not, say, Masur and Philadelphia’s Wolfgang Sawallisch. The San Francisco Symphony’s attention to American maverick composers has been deemed significant enough that University of California Press is publishing a book on the subject this month. Both Los Angeles and San Francisco have retained their recording contracts (and both have had a good record of releasing chart-topping bestsellers, something the Old Five haven’t done in a very long time). San Francisco has lately signed a long-term commissioning deal with John Adams and has also decided to augment its commercial recordings with its own in-house CDs of the nine Mahler symphonies, MTT and his orchestra being the most exciting Mahler combination anywhere right now.

But a closer examination of the seasons in Los Angeles and San Francisco reveals that they are only marginally more lively than those on the East Coast. Which orchestra sounds best depends on the music, the conductor and the position of the moon. What the West has done, and the East desperately needs to do, is create the sense of something happening. That has come from Salonen and Tilson Thomas, and that is what will have to come from the new men in the East.

Under their new music directors, the East Coast orchestras will probably begin to slowly catch up with us. In the meantime, we in the West must continue to push ahead. Already there are rumors of a West Coast concert performance of “The Death of Klinghoffer.” Whether or not that comes about, it is good to have even the rumors, the notion that our orchestras do not want to shut the world out of their concert halls.

With so many orchestras in transition, it’s a critical time for classical music. If the West Coast succeeds in making orchestral music ever more timely, the Old Five will have no choice but to follow, and classical music as a whole will grow enormously in the process.

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Mark Swed is The Times’ music critic.