At 5 p.m. May 19, 1944, the musicians of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (SSO) emerged from a last-minute rehearsal for what was to be their inaugural concert only to find themselves on thin ice in two senses, the first meteorological.
As they left Central (now Faith) Methodist Church three hours before the performance was scheduled to begin, “A slick coating of ice coated the streets and windshields of cars,” Sherwood and Frances Moran write in their history of the orchestra’s first 25 years. “It was scarcely possible (for the musicians) to get home to supper, much less return for the 8 o’clock performance.
“And what chances were there for an audience?” the account continues. “Should the whole thing be postponed?”
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As though dispatched by central casting to portray a knight in shining armor, founding conductor William Fiedler — head of the music department at Antioch College and a member of the Boston Fiedler family of conductors – is reported to have stepped forward to say: “We’ll never rest easy ‘til we’ve finished this concert.”
The orchestra followed his lead, the Morans write, “to the great pleasure of about 1,500 cash-paying customers.”
At 7:30 p.m. Saturday, SSO conductor and music director Peter Stafford Wilson will raise his baton in the Kuss Auditorium of the Clark State Performing Arts Center on the orchestra’s 75th season.
Like the symphony’s first program, it will feature a Brahms composition, the Symphony No. 3. It will be followed by Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 “Emperor,” with soloist and Wittenberg University Professor Chris Durrenberger.
The event in the beautiful concert hall in which it takes place will honor the immense amount of work that generations of Springfielders have put forth to support, sustain and perform in the orchestra.
In the founding days, many musicians did double-duty. Concertmaster Edwin Juergens, who had played with orchestras in Chicago, Buffalo and Cincinnati, managed the SSO. First violinist Robert McIntire served as secretary and treasurer William Minnick was a violist. Four board members also performed.
At just its second concert, the orchestra also showed the kind of wisdom required to fill seats by asking Springfield’s own Jean Geis, a former student of Springfield’s Ralph Zirkle, to perform. Geis by then had been praised in the New York Times as “an immediate success” for a night’s playing in Carnegie Hall the critic said “exhibited dash and fire, and control of color, rhythm and dynamics.”
In the orchestra’s second year, other women, stepped forward to do what they have done for the orchestra ever since: pay the piper, this time by securing the Springfield News-Sun and the Downtown Merchant’s Council as orchestra sponsors. The Evening Fortnightly Music Club also was a faithful supporter.
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By 1946, the orchestra was performing in Memorial Hall when a new sense of prestige arrived with second conductor Walter Heerman. Then the assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony and a man who had made his world premier as a cellist performing with his world-renown German father and the peerless Richard Strauss.
Two years later, second conductor Guy Taylor, a graduate of the Julliard School of Music – and who later would study with Eugene Ormandy and Cleveland Orchestra maestro George Szell — introduced another fundamental element of the orchestra’s long term success.
By involving Wittenberg College, whose students and staff have been involved with the orchestra ever since, the orchestra’s first resident conductor took the first step to forge alliances with other communities of musicians and singers to strengthen and add variety to the SSO’s then four annual performances.
Taylor expanded local interest by writing a regular music column for the News-Sun, as he would for papers at subsequent conducting engagements in Nashville, Phoenix and Fresno, Calif. As David Cooke reports in his history of the SSO, Taylor and his wife, Renee, said a special farewell in his final concert as conductor when they combined talents in performing Beethoven’s Sonata for Violin and Piano.
Under Taylor’s leadership, the orchestra grew from 60 musicians to 75, most of whom had the pleasure in 1951 of playing under 27-year-old Evan Whallon, the symphony’s fourth conductor and winner of the Young Conductor’s Competition.
Again as reported by Cooke, Whallon’s debut concert featured performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 by one of the great classical pianists of the 20th Century, Byron Janis.
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Whallon’s years, Cooke writes, also shone with the performance of Overture Breve, commissioned for the SSO’s 10th anniversary; an appearance by violinist Isaac Stern; a star-studded performance of the Bizet opera Carmen; Springfield’s hosting of the annual conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League; and a final concert that brought Metropolitan Opera star Eileen Farrell to perform with the orchestra.
The result, according to reports by the Springfield News-Sun and The (morning) Sun, was that, by mid-April of 1957 “Seventy-five persons in five countries … have applied for the position of conductor of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra.”
Whallon’s replacement, Jackson Wiley, would leave an even larger mark on the community, according to previous reporting by the News-Sun.
“He formed the Springfield Youth Symphony and the Chorale and, more recently headed the annual Arts Festivals,” the newspaper wrote.
Although the still-running Summer Arts Festival has clearly stood the test of time, it’s easy to overlook the impeccable timing of organizing a youth orchestra just as the post-war Baby Boom was reaching a crescendo.
“He also originated student concerts for elementary and junior high school students, in which music was played and narrated. The symphony usually played for audiences of upwards of 4,000 students fitted into memorial in three performances the same day.”
An adept jazz player in his student days, the Julliard graduate was able to mix that interest into his symphony programming and, with a symphony performance on the city’s Esplanade, was the first one to bring the orchestra outdoors.
In the two years Robert Gutter served as conductor, John Smarelli, who would become the symphony concertmaster during Gutter’s time, was also known to generations of Springfield students as the leader of the City Schools orchestral programs.
That set the stage for John Ferrito, who garnered an ASCAP award for the orchestra in 1972, his second year on the podium, for adventuresome programming in contemporary. The conductor and his talented violinist wife, Marsha, left a lasting impression on the community and its orchestra. Their years with the orchestra are chronicled by the distinctive writing of the News-Sun’s Jim Hays, who opened a March 13, 1981, profile of the conductor with the elegance of orchestral music.
“Midmorning light glimmered with the covenant of spring as it moves, in pavane tempo, around the musician’s quite living room. The light glided or a moment over a framed poster of George Szell, stepped on to glint upon the glass that covered old and recent family portraits, then glanced across bookcases whose volumes ranged from The Poetry of Catullus, Spinoza’s Ethics and T.S. Eliot to P.G. Wodehouse.”
Cooke’s history reports that as the works of Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Copland, Dvorak, Mozart and Beethoven continued to be performed, the work of community members like Mary and Ken Rush, Shirley Robinson, Carolyn Hobson, Martin Cooke, Patricia Wickham and others stepped forth to lead offstage. Pops names like Doc Serverinsen, Crystal Gayle, Mel Torme and Henry Mancini took the stage, as did local talents Ian Polster, Trudy Faber, Richard York, Phillip Magnuson and Springfield vibraphonist Johnny Lytle.
Cooke also reports that the 1980s “were tough times” for an SSO that was “still musically strong but threatened by budget restraints and deficits. In addition, largely due to the move from Memorial Hall (which closed) to Springfield North High School’s auditorium, audiences began to shrink.”
The symphony answered with the 1986 hiring of executive director Greg Anthes, who helped to boost concert attendance with what News-Sun columnist Ron Carter called “a change in approach.”
“Most notably, the orchestra has become a more active force in the community, staging up-close-and-personal … events like Lunch on the Lawn, Lunch on the Plaza and Flavors of Springfield. Anthes has also attempted to make concert nights for of an event. This includes a pre-concert discussion by Wittenberg University Professor Bill Walters about that night’s program, the complimentary coffee, tea and cookies served in the lobby, and the after concert meet-the-artists parties.”
Like the rest of the community the SSO received a huge boost with the opening of the gorgeous Kuss Auditorium and the rest of the Performing Arts Center 25 years ago. The venue provided an idyllic setting for the final Ferrito years and the arrival of Peter Stafford Wilson in the 2002-2003 season got the orchestra off to a strong start in a new millennium.
The symphony’s bio page on its current conductor says all that needs to be said. Just as Jean Geis helped launch the orchestra, an appearance by Hillary Hahn, a world-talent with local ties, delighted the local audience. Andre Watts, Twyla Robinson, Pepe Romero, and Misha Dichter appeared on the same stage, along with the kind of emerging talent the orchestra always has sought.
Innovative programming including not only the performance of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti in one evening but programs that engaged the community in a ground-breaking way with Agriculture & The Arts Growing Together, a photo-choreographed program featuring images of local farmers at work and the music of Aaron Copland, and American Made: A Celebration of Manufacturing, a like-minded presentation with a different focus. The orchestra and Wittenberg combined again in 2011 to present The Planets with the assistance of physics professor Dan Fleisch and theater professor Steve Reynolds.
Wilson garnered the symphony’s second ASCAP Award for Creative Programming by featuring a living composer in each of its programs and has raised the spirit and contributions of the symphony chorale with performances including Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass in D minor.
As the symphony opens its 75th season following the theme “Music, Community, Magic!” community orchestras are, in general, struggling to maintain their audiences, a struggle that always has had implications for their bottom lines.
Wilson sees the path to the future in innovation.
“I think the tried and true concert, the formal viewing orchestral music, will still be there,” he said, “but I think you’ll see a lot of experimentation with format and content.”
Cutting-edge orchestras are doing “a lot of smaller ensemble activities, a lot of concerts in different venues at different times. I think you’ll see things like “Mozart at the Museum.”
“I think you’ll also see a lot of performances with the orchestra in different roles,” providing the music for video sequences as is planned for this season’s planned Disney concert. “I really do think that’s the future” – one that, going forward will add to “quite a distinguished history” for a community of Springfield’s size an orchestra that started out on thin ice.
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