Joe Horowitz has his doubts:

Ormandy’s recorded accompaniments to Rachmaninoff’s First, Second, and Fourth Piano Concertos are merely supportive: they give the soloist nothing to work with. (My pianist friend George Vatchnadze, describing the Rachmaninoff-Ormandy relationship, calls Ormandy a “puppy” and a “servant” — apt adjectives.) Stokowski’s accompaniment to the Second Concerto is unique. The signature lava flow of his magnificent Philadelphia strings is not only memorably ravishing; it is acutely calibrated in dialogue with the composer/pianist. It is not for nothing that Rachmaninoff called Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra the greatest orchestra that had ever existed.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about, listen first to the passage from the First Concerto that Vladimir Horowitz once identified as the only instance of RCA adequately conveying Rachmaninoff’s art. This is the piano solo beginning at 12:52 here. And observe how the intrusion of Ormandy’s generic accompaniment cancels the abandon of Rachmaninoff’s playing, with its untethered rubatos and magically layered dynamics….

Read on here.

Scenes from BSO Resound, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s disability ensemble. The challenges range from autism to blindness to multiple sclerosis and other physical disabiliti4es.

BSO Resound played at the BBC Proms this summer.

Be moved.

We counted them:

2 in Chicago (including principal Cynthia Yeh)

1 in Philadelphia

1 each in Hawaii and Rochester.

This looks like a closed shop.

We also hear that the number of young women inducted into the New World Symphony has been falling year by year. The orchestra does not use a screen for auditions.