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The Chicago Symphony. Winner and still champion, Solti's virtuosic ensemble has been the finest in the U.S. for more than a decade, and was often close to the top under earlier music directors like Fritz Reiner (1953-62). The orchestra's strengths are its burnished brass and taut, lean, precise string section, which give its performances a crispness and vitality that are the despair of its rivals. "I have never had a better-spirited orchestra than this one," says Solti, 70. "If they have a conductor they respect, they will go through hell for him." The Chicago spirit is evident both in music of the classical period, like Mozart's, and in the great romantic works: Mahler and Bruckner symphonies and Strauss tone poems. Last week's dazzling performance under Solti of Wagner's complete opera Das Rheingold matched an orchestra at the top of its form with a conductor at the height of his interpretive prowess.
The St. Louis Symphony. Founded in 1880, this orchestra is the country's second oldest (after the 140-year-old New York Philharmonic) but is still youthful by virtue of its many young players. Building on the legacy of sober, European conductors like Vladimir Golschmann and Walter Susskind, St. Louis has come into its own as a tightly disciplined ensemble under the impressively gifted American conductor Leonard Slatkin, 38. Like the Chicago Symphony, which it resembles in style and flair, the St. Louis Symphony is at its best in big pieces, but of a more recent vintage: Rachmaninoff's orchestral music, Shostakovich and Prokofiev symphonies. Good as the orchestra is, its fortunes remain closely tied to Slatkin's.
The Boston Symphony. The patrician Boston Symphony is the quintessential major orchestra: old (101) and wealthy, with a comfortable home in the acoustically excellent Symphony Hall and a bucolic summer retreat at Tanglewood, in the Berkshires. A11 this would not be worth much, though, if the orchestra did not play so consistently well: under music directors as disparate in taste and talents as Serge Koussevitzky, Charles Munch, Erich Leinsdorf and, now, Seiji Ozawa, 47, it has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to adapt to almost any type of music conductorial style. Boston's full strings, warm winds and elegant brass are always in bloom.
The Philadelphia Orchestra. During their 44 years under Conductor Eugene Ormandy, the Philadelphians became known for their exceptionally rich string tone, at least partly produced by compensating for the dry acoustics in their home, the Academy of Music; curiously, the "Philadelphia sound" could not be fully appreciated in Philadelphia, but only in a sympathetic environment like New York's Carnegie Hall. Under Riccardo Muti, 41, the Italian conductor who succeeded Ormandy in the 1980-81 season, the sound is losing its sometimes overripe fullness and becoming leaner, with greater prominence being given to the winds and brass. The adjustment, though, is not being accomplished without some temporary loss of stature; and Muti so far is more convincing in opera than in orchestral music.