WRTI presents a special two-week series on The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert, for the ensemble's 125th anniversary season. Here is a companion piece about “the Philadelphia Sound" — how it came about, and how it kept going.
In the opening scene of Fantasia (1940), Leopold Stokowski ascends to the podium against a cobalt-blue backdrop, raising his arms like a condor taking flight, to lead his extravagant arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. During the Toccata, the film spotlights the conductor and the musicians, but in the Fugue he disappears into a cloud, as the visuals morph into a blizzard of abstract images.
Stokowski’s vision of Bach not only amplified the composer’s organ lines, but — coupled with Disney animators — created a Cecil B. DeMille-like theatricality, the visual glow matching the textural splendor.
For many listeners, that grandeur marked their first encounter with “The Philadelphia Sound,” the ensemble’s distinctive color, known mostly but not exclusively through its strings. Though Stokowski was the ensemble’s third music director, following Fritz Scheel (1900-1907) and Karl Pohlig (1907-1912), he was responsible for creating these legendary timbres, and for vaulting the results to worldwide prominence.
The conductor achieved some of that opulence by asking string players to stagger their bow strokes to create a seamless tonal river, a technique of unsynchronized bowing noted by David Patrick Stearns. In a 2015 article for Classical Voice, Stearns recalls William de Pasquale, former first violinist of the orchestra, citing bow pressure as another factor, and acknowledging that the musicians made further adjustments depending on the conductor. In perhaps a subconscious nod to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence in Fantasia, veteran violinist Davyd Booth calls Stokowski “a magician,” an image perhaps reinforced by the conductor’s forgoing a baton, leaving viewers in awe of his hands.
Further insights come from a trove of Stokowski’s personal papers, housed at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. Materials in the collection mention his adoption of a “free breathing” technique for brass and winds, along with changing the musicians’ seating, all to create a new orchestral palette. The papers also confirm Stokowski’s keen interest in acoustics and recording, as they pertain to the production and transmission of sound.
For Fantasia, Disney engineers developed Fantasound, a multichannel system designed to more fully reproduce the experience of hearing an orchestra live. The technical requirements of the system proved too complex and expensive to sustain, but according to a 2024 article in the audiophile PMA Magazine, “the techniques Disney’s engineers developed for Fantasound would become the foundation of modern surround sound technology.”
Similarly, Stokowski’s sorcery set in motion a phenomenon that continued to blossom in subsequent decades. Throughout the orchestra’s history, “the Sound” has been revered and nurtured by his successors.
Perhaps its greatest champion was Eugene Ormandy, during his record-setting tenure (1936-1980) that produced an astonishing legacy of recordings. There may be no better example than the beloved Serenade for Strings album, released in 1960, with luxurious treatments of Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, Barber, and Borodin. The entire album is undeniably seductive — the aural equivalent of being enfolded in the most comfortable, ergonomically-designed chair in the house.
Among his many virtues, Ormandy also realized the limitations of the orchestra’s home, the venerable Academy of Music, which likely played a role in the development of the ensemble’s character. The building’s 1857 interior is visually glorious, with a bust of Mozart over the stage and on either side, four statues representing Poetry and Music propping up the ceiling. But the room is not the most convivial, acoustically speaking. Over decades of concerts and operas, I recall nights when waves of sound — glorious as they were — seemed to pour off of the stage and onto the floor. Despite being the recording venue for most of Fantasia, engineers have recognized the Academy’s limitations, and during the Ormandy years they often opted for two now-vanished venues, Town Hall and the Broadwood Hotel, to capture “the Sound.” One can only speculate how recordings and performances might have fared in an environment that embraced the players more fully, such as the halls in Boston, Amsterdam, or Vienna.
Some of the Orchestra’s musicians have remarked on Ormandy’s ability to adapt to the sonic limitations of the space, and perhaps the Academy’s deficit was the ensemble’s gain. In the video cited above, Gloria de Pasquale, a cellist with the orchestra for more than four decades, describes the conductor urging the strings “to play in a certain way in order to get a cohesive sound.” Booth noted the conductor’s request for lots of vibrato — perhaps unusually, even in pizzicato passages. Booker Rowe, a violinist in the Orchestra from 1971 to 2020, recalls Ormandy’s downbeats, “like you’re landing on a cloud,” which also may have been a response to the space. “Even in the loudest passages, they boomed out, but they boomed out with a smoothness.”
The Post-Ormandy Years
In 1980, Riccardo Muti became Ormandy’s successor, and continued to shepherd what he called the group’s “perfume.” He recalls his 1972 debut with the orchestra (in Mozart and Prokofiev) and in another nod to his predecessors, he marveled, “I had never heard such beauty.” In works by composers he adores — Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, and above all, Verdi — Muti fine-tuned further, using “the Sound” to bring the audience closer to composers’ time periods.
His late-1980s Scriabin recordings deploy the ensemble to voluptuous effect, with the Philadelphia players and the savvy EMI engineers offering a noticeable improvement on the mostly-Russian recordings available prior to this series. Muti knew he had a hothouse of artists who could lean into the composer’s sumptuous phrases more effectively.
In 2000, a commemorative set of recordings released for The Philadelphia Orchestra’s 100th birthday spurred Jay Nordlinger, writing in The New Criterion, to declare the group “the most treasured musical institution in the world.” Tracing an arc spanning Stokowski’s tenure through that of Wolfgang Sawallisch, the conductor at the time, Nordlinger reaffirmed Stokowski’s achievements, this time in a 1964 Sibelius Second Symphony. “In every bar, the Philadelphia Sound is gloriously apparent: lush, romantic, irresistible.” He also praised the strings’ colleagues: “The brass, too, is gleaming and even, with none of the blaring that can spoil an orchestral performance.”
That brass recognition is a good reminder that the strings are not the sole architects of the ensemble’s mantle. In the 1960s, some of the brass players united for a small spinoff, the Philadelphia Brass Ensemble, which has its own distinguished recorded legacy. Their elegance is audible in the Ormandy boxes cited above; trumpets and trombones, which in lesser ensembles can pierce like javelins, instead give off an inviting glow. Similarly, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Orchestra’s principal winds joined forces for the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet, and made a sheaf of recordings for Columbia. It’s hard to overstate the musicians’ achievements at the time, on works by composers as diverse as Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, Henry Cowell, and (in an outlier for RCA Victor) even Ornette Coleman.
Every section — every player — of the group does their part to shepherd that glow. Bassoonist Angela Anderson Smith treasures her 1931 Heckel instrument, one of the finest made by that manufacturer. Charlie Rosmarin, a percussionist with the ensemble since 2024, carries a special gel in his bag “that dampens overly ringy drumheads.” Tools and ongoing maintenance are chosen with assiduous care, and that fastidiousness is yet another factor in the whole becoming more than the sum of its parts.
The Sound Enters a New Century
From 1993 to 2003, Sawallisch added his own sheen, with particular expertise in works by composers such as Richard Strauss and Dvořák. Both he and his successor, Christoph Eschenbach, added their own refinements to the Sound, and Eschenbach’s stewardship must have been a factor in garnering a new recording contract on Ondine, which produced outstanding examples of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich, among an impressively diverse roster of composers.
In the Yannick Nézet-Séguin era, some feel that his sculpting instincts hark back to the Stokowski era. Whether in new takes on Rachmaninoff, Brahms, or composers never before tackled by the ensemble, the venerable Deutsche Grammophon label is documenting the current age in Marian Anderson Hall, the orchestra’s home since 2001 and an acoustic improvement over the Academy. One ideal barometer is a series of groundbreaking recent recordings of works by Florence Price, William Grant Still, and Margaret Bonds. Some of these, such as Price’s First Symphony, also give the group’s percussion virtuosos (with whistles!), a chance to shine.
As a nod to previous eras, intentional or not, Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestra offer a contemporary demonstration of the Sound in works that deserve to find an audience in the 21st century. Stokowski might have applauded Nézet-Séguin for using the orchestral power so persuasively.
In an interview included in Stokowski’s 1943 book, Music for All of Us, he revealed some of his philosophical ideals as a conductor, commenting on the orchestra as a “means to an end. We’re like an electric wire that runs from one place to another and conveys electricity to a lamp, we might say, to give light."
That idea of illumination set in motion a decades-long ride, shaped by his successors and ultimately treasured by millions of listeners around the world. And it should be noted that, in a parallel universe, many music lovers think of “the Philadelphia Sound” thanks to two other Philly legends, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who defined an era with their iconic soul recordings in the 1970s.
In the classical music world, that sound continues to resonate thanks to 125 years of experimentation, a ton of hard work, and the laws of physics. Stokowski’s enduring gift is thoughtful, joyous music-making at its most collaborative.
