During this time, the Orchestra broadcast live concerts on PBS, performed The Rite of Spring at Carnegie Hall to great acclaim and presented a retrospective of the works of Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall in a concert praised by the composer himself.
The Orchestra gained even wider recognition under the direction of Hugh Wolff (1985–92). Vaughan won an Emmy Award for this performance, and the New Jersey Symphony received national acclaim. Another highlight of these years was the New Jersey Symphony’s first nationwide PBS telecast, “Gershwin and Song,” with Newark native and jazz great Sarah Vaughn. His programming had a definite Slavic flavor and culminated in an electrifying all-Szymanowski program at Carnegie Hall that garnered considerable praise. (The Orchestra would perform with Pavarotti again in 1984, in the first classical music program ever performed at Madison Square Garden.)įollowing Lewis’ departure in 1976 and a year of transition, Thomas Michalak was selected to lead the New Jersey Symphony in 1977. Notable highlights of the Lewis years included the New Jersey Symphony’s Carnegie Hall debut with famous soprano (and Lewis’ wife) Marilyn Horne, who became a regular guest soloist with the Orchestra during Lewis’ tenure a performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, during the venue’s inaugural season in 1971 three outdoor concerts dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, in a vacant lot on Prince Street-the site of the 1967 Newark Riots-in 1968 and a concert at the Garden State Arts Center (now PNC Bank Arts Center) with Luciano Pavarotti making his American orchestral debut. With the appointment of Henry Lewis as music director in 1968-making Lewis the first African-American music director of a major symphony orchestra-the New Jersey Symphony entered a new era of high-profile musical activity. A student of Serge Koussevitsky and Leonard Bernstein, Schermerhorn expanded the Orchestra’s performance schedule both in terms of number of concerts and locales, and he broadened its repertoire to include 20th-century music. Studer in Montclair, established the New Jersey Symphony’s first youth orchestra in 1955 and began radio broadcasts on WNJR.įollowing Antek’s sudden death in 1958 and the brief tenure of Mathys Abas, the New Jersey Symphony was led by Kenneth Schermerhorn (1962–67).
#TOWARD THE SPLENDID CITY DANIELPOUR SERIES#
Antek created the “Music for Fun” series of children’s concerts, introduced the first outdoor pops concert on the estate of Augustus C. His stated need for an orchestra to have “a sense of belonging, of being part of the inner core of a community’s life,” focused the expansion of the New Jersey Symphony’s role in its communities via music education programs and statewide service.
Samuel Antek, a Toscanini prodigy and concertmaster under Rene Pollain, became the New Jersey Symphony’s music director in 1947.
An impressive roster of guest soloists graced the Orchestra’s stages, including Percy Grainger, Pablo Casals, José Iturbi, Mieczslaw Horszowski, Joseph Szigeti, Artur Schnabel and Efrem Zimbalist. Composers most frequently presented were Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. Over the next two decades, the Orchestra’s core repertoire was expanded and the ensemble tightened under the leadership of Rene Pollain (1929–40) and Frieder Weissman (1940–47).
Philip James led this group of only 19 string players in a program that included music by Purcell, Saint-Saëns and Veracini, as well as the world premiere of The Dark Road by American composer Cecil Forsyth. In 1922, the ensemble that would later be known as the New Jersey Symphony gave its first concert at the Montclair Art Museum, a fittingly local venue for the beginning of an organization that has defined itself through its community connections.
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