Dudamel’s New York Dream

The concert orchestra is an American specialty. Theodore Thomas, whose touring Thomas Orchestra, founded in 1862, was the first world-class New World symphonic ensemble, preached, “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of a community, not opera.” Thomas performed Beethoven in cities large and small, coast to coast, north to south. In 1891 he became the first music director of the Chicago Orchestra, today the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.A second colossal figure in the early history of American classical music was Henry Higginson, the banker who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony beginning in 1881. He built Boston’s Symphony Hall two decades later. Musically schooled in Vienna, Higginson hired the players, chose the conductors, and shouldered the deficits. Already in its early years his orchestra was giving more than one hundred concerts per season. No less than Chicago’s, it was a civic fixture—as was Higginson himself.By 1907 Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and St. Louis also had professional concert orchestras of substantial accomplishment. This remarkable proliferation was unparalleled abroad. It resumed after World War I in cities of every size. An orchestr...