Nashville Symphony
Nashville Symphony discography
Nashville Symphony biography
Biography by Joseph Stevenson The Nashville Symphony Orchestra emerged in the 1980s as an important American regional orchestra, and at the turn of the century seemed close to realizing its intentions to become nationally recognized. Nashville is located on the Cumberland River, a major artery for westward settlement and eastward trade. It became a major trading center. Being centrally located helped ensure that it would be named state capitol. Nashville has long been known as the capital of American country music. This reputation originated when the strong radio station WLS began airing the live Saturday night program "The Grand Ole Opry." Country music became a major industry in the city, which is the most important center for recording activities in the USA after New York and Los Angeles. Thus, it is home to many versatile studio musicians and well-equipped recording facilities. Although there had been symphonic music (usually played by visiting or ad hoc groups) earlier in Nashville's history, the first established regular orchestra, the Symphony Society, was founded in 1920 from with a core of professional musicians and amateur music-lovers. It was headed by George Pullen Jackson, a professor at the city's Vanderbilt University and music critic of the Nashville Banner newspaper. The Symphony Society did not survive the economic depression of the 1930s. In 1945 Nashville native Walter Sharp was mustered out of the Army after combat service in World War II. He returned home determined to establish a symphony orchestra. He gathered a group of other music-lovers and founded the Nashville Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra initially played in the city's War Memorial Auditorium. The first music director was William Strickland, who was with the orchestra until 1951. Strickland established high standards from the beginning, and went on to notable success, primarily with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Successive music directors were Guy Taylor (1951-1959), Willis Page (1959-1967), Thor Johnson (1967-1975), and Michael Charry (1976-1982). Under Charry, the orchestra moved to its own permanent facility at the new Tennessee Performing Arts Center, where it now gives an annual ten-concert classical series and a pops series. It also functions as the orchestra for the Nashville Ballet and the Nashville Opera, and participates in an outreach program for the state of Tennessee. Counting other special events at various venues including the country music centers the Ryman Auditorium and the historic Grand Ole Opry House, the orchestra plays over 200 performances a year. A traditional annual function is participation in the 22-city tour of "Amy Grant's Christmas." The music director since 1983 has been Kenneth Schermerhorn. He has raised it to national standards. The orchestra at the turn of the century comprised eighty-nine musicians. The Nashville Symphony Orchestra was part of a major studio project, the music score to the PBS series "Liberty! The American Revolution." This score wove symphonic scoring with folk and other music appropriate to the Revolutionary period and included diverse soloists such as James Taylor, Yo-Yo Ma, and Wynton Marsalis. The Sony Classical CD from the soundtracks was one of the first national releases of the orchestra. The Nashville Symphony's first straight classical release was an album oddly juxtaposing Antonin Dvorák's "New World" Symphony with New York composer David Amram's Kokopelli. Following the establishment in 1998 of the "Symphony 2000" plan designed to advance the orchestra into the ranks of the best-known major U.S. orchestras, it started making a series of recordings with Naxos Records of music of Howard Hanson and Charles Ives. The Symphony 2000 plan included a major tour of the United States featuring the orchestra's first appearance at Carnegie Hall in New York in September, 2000.