MAESTRO MUTI MOLDS HIS PHILADELPHIA SOUND

PHILADELPHIA —  The “solid gold Cadillac of orchestras” was the way it was described roughly a decade ago by one New York critic. Most valuable among the Philadelphia Orchestra’s assets was the distinctive sound it could produce.

That “Philadelphia sound”--a plush, burnished, string-heavy tone--became the group’s trademark during the late Eugene Ormandy’s 44-year tenure as music director, and it remains closely linked with the orchestra in the minds of many listeners even six years after the maestro retired. Says longtime concertmaster Norman Carol: “People still think, if the Philadelphia Orchestra’s around, then ‘the sound’ can’t be far behind.”

The sound may be what many listeners will expect to hear when Philadelphia performs at Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara Friday, Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena June 1-3 and in Royce Hall at UCLA June 4. The concerts, part of the ensemble’s current North American tour, mark the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphians’ first visit to Los Angeles, which they last visited in 1971.

But what audiences actually hear should be something different altogether. For since Riccardo Muti took over as music director in 1980, at age 39, the Philadelphia Orchestra has changed significantly.

Veteran violinist David Arben recalls, “Under Ormandy, there was a sense of gravity to everything we did, from rehearsing to recording. Everything we played sounded weighty, it never took off. We were actually drowning in the beauty of our sound.”

But if Ormandy liked to pour the lush sound of his orchestra’s strings across everything from Bach to Brahms to Prokofiev, Muti has fostered a more diverse approach.

“The big thing with Ormandy was the sound of the orchestra, not his interpretations,” says English horn player Louis Rosenblatt. “With Muti, the opposite is more often the case.”

“I would rather have a Mozart sound, a Schumann sound, a Barber sound,” stated the Neopolitan-born conductor just before assuming directorship of the ensemble. During the past six years, he believes, that goal has been accomplished.

“The players have learned this now. We can do any repertory,” he says. Today, Philadelphia is a more virtuosic ensemble, more evenly balanced among the sections than it ever was during Ormandy’s days. Muti has fostered a brighter tone by giving more attention to the winds and brass. He has insisted on sharper attacks, sleeker performances.

At first, the changes met with critical resistance. Muti was attacked as being a matinee-idol conductor and his interpretations were considered facile, cold and bombastic. Writing in the Saturday Review, Irving Kolodin said the appointment of Muti was “somewhat like elevating a parish priest to the papacy. . . . The great orchestra of that city is as good as any in the world, and Muti is not as good as the orchestra.”

There remain those who find his work simply calculated and slick. Particularly when playing in concert version the revised editions of the Verdi operas he has strongly advocated, Muti can seem almost too devoted to the letter of the score--with the result that his performances sound dry and passionless, and domineering over the singers.

Yet in recent months, several respected critics have gone so far as to call Philadelphia the country’s finest orchestra. The players generally respect their conductor--something not that common.

“It’s normal for us to complain but I don’t hear the old complaints as much anymore. We think Muti’s serious and competent, and none of us think he’s a faker. He conducts everything as if he really knows it. And in that respect he’s extremely unusual,” says Rosenblatt.

Moreover, even some of Muti’s more ardent critics in the press have admitted respect for his seriousness and devotion.

In January, the ensemble’s reputation prompted an invitation from the Soviet Union to give concerts this spring in Leningrad and Moscow, as part of the U.S.-Soviet cultural exchange agreement signed at the Geneva summit last fall. Because of scheduling difficulties and the ensemble’s inability to raise enough funds in time, the Philadelphians couldn’t accept, but they remain the only American orchestra, so far, honored with the offer.

The changes to the orchestra have also met with acceptance in Philadelphia--though not without a quarrel. When Muti first came to the city there had been little indication of what he would eventually do. Ormandy, who had seen him conduct in Florence during a 1970 orchestra tour to Italy, invited the young man for a guest appearance in 1972. He became known locally as the elder’s protege and so when he was named as successor, many Philadelphians assumed he would maintain the status quo.

That was what lots of them wanted for the orchestra, which has always been regarded as the city’s leading cultural institution. Ormandy’s interpretive style reflected clearly Philadelphia’s long-standing self-image: traditional, stable if unspectacular. Ormandy himself--a benign-looking man, conservative in thinking and appearance--embodied that image, too.

His attitude towards programming carefully addressed the tastes of the old-line orchestra subscribers; consequently, the ensemble maintained a select but loyal following. Year in and year out, programs were filled with the same works by Beethoven and Brahms and audiences were filled with the same people. Choice subscription seats would be passed down through family wills, ensuring the role of concerts as places for the city’s high society to meet and mingle.

But Muti turned out to be something unexpected. Handsome, with a piercing glare, sharp Roman nose and mane of dark hair, he displayed little of Ormandy’s style or thinking. The elder conductor had been among the last of the major resident music directors, living in Philadelphia and becoming a familiar and trusted community figure. Muti, on the other hand, epitomized the jet-age maestro. He declared no intention of moving from his home in Ravenna, Italy, and, at first, showed little comfort with the Philadelphia social occasions that Ormandy regularly attended and that had endeared him so much to the orchestra’s wealthy patrons. Nor did he want his concerts to be treated as social events. His programs started promptly at 8.

Muti spent only 10 weeks each season with the orchestra at first (up to 16 now--comparable to other major directors). He devoted the rest of his time to guest conducting in the big concert halls and opera houses of Europe and to recording with European ensembles. Among his recent recordings are performances of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic, and of Bellini’s opera, “I Capuleti ed i Montecchi,” done live in 1984 at Covent Garden in London.

At the end of this year he begins his most important commitment outside Philadelphia when he becomes director of Milan’s La Scala opera house, the leading musical post in his native country. Time, he says, will be split evenly between the two jobs: “I will play no favorites.” And despite his devotion to Italy--”of course I will die in Italy or I will die over the Atlantic, trying to get there”--Muti insists he has no intention of abandoning Philadelphia.

He does, however, entertain hopes of leaving Philadelphia’s beloved Academy of Music and moving the orchestra into a new hall--something which has met with perhaps the most resistance of all from tradition-bound city residents. The elegant, ornate old auditorium, he contends, presents many acoustical and physical problems for his ensemble. Muti and his organization have pushed hard for the construction of an additional hall, leaving the Academy free for the local opera and ballet companies and for visiting musical organizations.

“We must have a place that is technically ready for the next century,” he insists. “Someplace with practice rooms, audition space, recording studio, TV and video equipment. The next century will see very few orchestras bringing music to the entire world on TV and I want this to be one of them.”

The notion of the orchestra playing anywhere but in the Academy is considered blasphemous by many older Philadelphians devoted to the hall. Only a bit less troubling to them have been the programs offered during recent years. Though not really more adventuresome than those of several other leading American orchestras, Philadelphia’s schedule of concerts has come to include the kind of music that has never before been done by the ensemble or at least hasn’t made its way onto this orchestra’s list since Leopold Stokowski was music director, a half-century ago.

The orchestra has performed concert versions of operas, included performances this season of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” Debussy’s “Pelleas et Melisande,” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle.” Less well-known works from the Romantic period have been performed, including Scriabin’s First Symphony, a recording of which has just been released.

Composer Richard Wernick has joined the organization as an adviser on programming and commissioning, and conductor Dennis Russell Davies, a proponent of contemporary music, has become the ensemble’s music director for the group’s annual August residency at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in Upstate New York. Last year, Davies invited Philip Glass to be composer-in-residence; this summer, Lou Harrison fills the post. And next season in Philadelphia will include the first of several works commissioned by the orchestra in honor of the 1987 bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. The composers are Milton Babbitt, Christopher Rouse, Ralph Shapey, Steven Stucky, Nicholas Thorne, Stanley Walden.

While such projects have not pleased all of the orchestra subscribers, the ensemble has been able to more than make up for their loss with new listeners, drawn increasingly from Philadelphia’s growing population of young professionals.

During Ormandy’s tenure, subscriptions were never much above 90% and by the end they dipped closer to 80% or 85%. In recent years, the orchestra has been over 99% sold-out by subscription. In fact, this season it voluntarily limited that figure to around 94%, leaving the remainder available for single-ticket sales and thereby opening the concerts to more people. Along the same lines, next season the number of Friday afternoon subscription concerts--usually attended by older listeners--will diminish so that more Friday evening performances, which are convenient for younger, working Philadelphians, can be added.

The results of all these alternations, hopes the ensemble’s administrators, is a made-over institution that will reflect the character and desires of Philadelphia today just as well as the old orchestra did a decade ago. So far, the signs have been good. But if the changes have slowly found acceptance at home, outside Philadelphia the refashioned ensemble may still surprise a few listeners.

“It takes quite a while for reputations to catch up with things,” says bass player Neil Courtney. “It may take forever for the gold Cadillac image to disappear. Actually, to use the same metaphor, today the orchestra’s a more finely tuned instrument; the tolerances are closer.” Nowadays, agrees Rosenblatt, “perhaps the better image is a solid gold Ferrari.”