It's a dark day in Philly now too

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Board of Directors voted to document for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday. It's an effort to reorganize in the face of a 5 million dollar working deficit. The contemporary season will retain as scheduled in the mean time, but this filing bodes ill for the arts inside the United States.

The Philadelphia Orchestra at the US ideal of Mahler's Eighth Symphony in 1916.

The Philadelphia Orchestra is one of world's most renowned and respected arts organizations. Over the course of its 110-year history, names that loom over the world of classical music have assumed its helm. Names like Wolfgang Sawallisch, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Riccardo Muti, Charles Dutoit and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Charles Dutoit

The Philadelphia Orchestra became the primary orchestra in the international to begin recording its paintings (in 1917) and turned into the first to seem often at the radio (in 1925). Under the baton of Leopold Stokowski, the Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the primary-ever multi-song, stereophonic soundtrack for Disney's Fantasia in 1940.

The Philadelphia Orchestra turned into the sector's first symphony to sell recordings in their paintings via downloads from their internet site in 2006 and later through iTunes.

The Kimmel Center, Philadelphia

From its unique home in Philly's Academy of Music to its surprising digs within the Kimmel Center nowadays, the Phildelphia Orchestra has been at the leading edge of adopting new technologies and attractive to new audiences. It's one in every of Philadelphia's (and the United States's, and the world's) superb cultural establishments and now all of that is at risk.

Interior shot of the Kimmel Center, Philadelphia, PA

Symphony orchestras aren't the sole province of the blue-haired and the idly wealthy. Arts organizations like the Philly Orchestra preserve and pass along the best of western civilization. Our very culture is at stake here. Arts organizations in general, and orchestras in particular, are community assets of the highest order. Keeping them alive needs to become a national priority.

This is the end result of decades of slashing arts investment in schools, arts investment domestically and humanities investment nationally. You can't have a tremendous kingdom with out wonderful art. Repeat that regularly sufficient till it sticks.

If you live in an area with an orchestra, please go see a overall performance. Then preserve going back. Make a donation even as you're there.

This is Eugene Ormandy at the helm in 1975 as he conducts Gustav Holst's The Planets, Opus 32: Jupiter the bringer of jollity.

Share this post