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Composer and educator Friedrich Cerha was one of the most widely honored musical figures in Austria in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He was closely identified with the perpetuation of the legacy of the Second Viennese School, but his activities extended into many other areas.

Cerha was born in Vienna on February 17, 1926. He took up the violin at age seven, tried his hand at composition two years later, and quickly progressed, taking counterpoint and harmony classes at Vienna's Realgymnasium in his early teens. At 17, Cerha was drafted into a German Luftwaffe unit. He was able to study at the University of Vienna for one semester but was sent to an officer training program in Denmark. While there, he stole a stack of blank military order documents and deserted, successfully making his way across Germany until he was impressed into a German brigade as Russia neared the German border. He deserted again, walked into Austria, and hid out in the mountains until it was safe to return to Vienna.

After completing his education in violin, composition, and general studies at the University of Vienna, in 1958, Cerha co-founded Die Reihe, an ensemble that often performed works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern (its name means "the row"), and in general, he had a strong reputation as an interpreter of their works on the violin. In 1959, Cerha began teaching at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna; he became a full professor in 1976 and taught there until 1988; his distinguished students included Karlheinz Essl.

Cerha may be best known for his 1979 completion of Alban Berg's opera Lulu, principally involving his orchestration of the unfinished third act. He was often involved with entirely different kinds of music, however; in 1960, he founded the Camerata Frescobaldiana. His own works include the opera Der Reise vom Steinfeld, commissioned by the Wiener Staatsoper, Impulse for large orchestra, performed at the 150th anniversary celebration of the Vienna Philharmonic in 2006, and concertos for violin and soprano saxophone. Along with his wife Gertraud, Cerha was a co-founder of a society honoring tonal composer Joseph Marx.

Cerha received the Great Austrian State Prize in 1986, as well as many other Austrian regional and national awards, including the Salzburg Music Prize in 2011 and the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2012. He continued composing into the 2010s decade; among his later works was 2012's Tagebuch for orchestra. Cerha died in Vienna on February 14, 2023, just three days before his 97th birthday. ~ James Manheim

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the three most acclaimed orchestras in America and one of the few serious rivals the New York Philharmonic has had in its long history. Curiously, the histories of the two orchestras are somewhat intermingled.

Theodore Thomas had organized and led orchestras in New York during the 1870s and 1880s, competing with the Philharmonic Society of New York for audiences, soloists, and American premieres of works. His orchestra did very well as a major rival to the group that would become the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra visited Chicago during several seasons, and it was intended that he would be music director of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in that city. However, in 1891, he abandoned New York entirely in favor of Chicago and arrived as the first conductor of what was then called the Chicago Orchestra. Thomas held that position until his death in 1905. In his honor, the Chicago Orchestra changed its name to the Theodore Thomas Orchestra in 1906. Six years later, the group was renamed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

It was under the leadership of Thomas' assistant, Frederick Stock, that the Chicago Symphony's modern reputation was formed. From 1905 until his death in 1942, Stock led the orchestra in decades of programs that featured not only the established classics but the American premieres of many post-romantic works. Additionally, Stock raised the level of performance and the financial status of his players and established the orchestra in a major teaching role for aspiring musicians in its home city. Its recordings were relatively few in number because the long-playing record -- central to the appreciation of classical music -- had not yet been invented, which means there is little evidence by which modern listeners can judge the work of the orchestra during this period, but some of the recordings from that era were among the best in the world at the time. Among the few available from the period on major labels are the Beethoven Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5 on the BMG label, featuring soloist Arthur Schnabel with Stock conducting.

Stock's death in 1942 precipitated a difficult decade for the orchestra. Apart from the general complications of World War II, it had a great deal of trouble finding acceptable leadership. Désiré Defauw lasted for only four years, from 1943 until 1947, and Artur Rodzinski (best known for his leadership of the New York Philharmonic) was in the job for only one year (1947-1948). Rafael Kubelik served three years as music director from 1950 until 1953, but his gentlemanly manner and decidedly modern, European-centered taste in music proved unsuited to the players, critics, and management -- although it was under Kubelik that the orchestra made its first successful modern recordings, for the Mercury label, many of which were reissued in the mid-'90s.

Fritz Reiner became the music director of the Chicago Symphony in 1953, beginning the modern renaissance and blossoming of the orchestra. Under Reiner, the orchestra's playing sharpened and tightened, achieving a clean, precise, yet rich sound that made it one of the most popular orchestras in the United States. The Chicago Symphony under Reiner became established once and for all as an international-level orchestra of the first order, rivaling the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony. Moreover, Reiner's arrival with the orchestra coincided with its move to RCA Victor, which, in 1954, was beginning to experiment with stereo recording. With Reiner as conductor, these "Living Stereo" recordings -- characterized by vivid textures, sharp stereo separation, and microphone placement that gave the impact of a live performance -- became some of the best-selling classical albums of all time and have since been reissued numerous times on compact disc to new acclaim from critics and listeners, more than a generation removed from their original era.

Reiner's death in 1963 led to another interregnum period, during which conductor Jean Martinon led the orchestra (1963-1968). In 1969, Sir Georg Solti joined the orchestra as its music director. Under Solti, the orchestra's national and international reputations soared, as did its record sales. Reiner had begun the process of cultivating the burgeoning audience for late-romantic composers such as Mahler, but it was with Solti that the works of Mahler and Bruckner became standard fare in the orchestra's programs, right alongside those of Beethoven and Mozart. The playing standard achieved during Solti's tenure, in concert and recordings, was the highest in the history of the orchestra. Additionally, the orchestra under Solti began a quarter-century relationship with London Records that resulted in some of the best-sounding recordings of the era. Solti's approach to performance was very flamboyant yet intensely serious -- even his performances of lighter opera and concert overtures strike a perfect balance between broad gestures and finely wrought detail, attributes that have made him perhaps the most admired conductor of a major American orchestra, if not the most famous (Leonard Bernstein inevitably got more headlines during the 1960s, especially with his knack for publicity). Solti was both popular and respected, and his tenure with the Chicago Symphony coincided with his becoming the winner of the greatest number of Grammy Awards of any musician in history (he also recorded with orchestras in London and Vienna). Daniel Barenboim succeeded Solti and served as music director from 1991 until 2006, with Solti transitioning to the post of music director emeritus. Bernard Haitink was named the orchestra's first principal conductor, holding this position from 2006 through 2010. Riccardo Muti was chosen as the tenth music director in the orchestra's history in 2010.

As with other major American orchestras, the Chicago Symphony found itself competing with its own history, especially where recordings are concerned. Reissues of its work under Reiner and Solti continue to sell well and are comparable or superior to the orchestra's current recordings in sound and interpretive detail. Even the early-'50s recordings under Kubelik were reissued by Mercury in the late '90s, while RCA-BMG and some specialty collector's labels have re-released the recordings under Stock. The recordings of Solti and Reiner leading the Chicago Symphony are uniformly excellent, and virtually all of them can be recommended. The orchestra also maintains composer-in-residence and artist-in-residence partnerships; in 2023, Jessie Montgomery occupied the former, and Hilary Hahn the latter. ~ Bruce Eder

In the words of one of his biographers, conductor Jean Martinon's performances "were distinguished by a concern for translucent orchestral textures, and sustained by a subtle sense of rhythm and phrasing." Occasionally, "he stressed a poetic inflection at the expense of literal accuracy."

Martinon's first instrument was the violin; he studied at the Lyons Conservatory (1924-1925), then transferred to the Paris Conservatory, where he won first prize in violin upon his graduation in 1928. He subsequently studied composition, with Albert Roussel, and conducting, with Charles Munch and Roger Desormière. Until the outbreak of World War II, Martinon was primarily a composer. His early substantial works include a Symphoniette for piano, percussion, and strings (1935); Symphony No. 1 (1936); Concerto giocoso for violin and orchestra (1937); and a wind quintet (1938). At the start of the war he was drafted into the French army. Taken prisoner in 1940, he passed the next two years in a Nazi labor camp. There, he wrote Stalag IX (Musique d'exil), an orchestral piece incorporating elements of jazz; during his internment, he also composed several religious works, including Absolve, Domine for male chorus and orchestra, and Psalm 136 (Chant des captifs), the latter receiving a composition prize from the city of Paris in 1946.

Upon his release from the Nazi camp, Martinon became conductor of the Bordeaux Symphony Orchestra (from 1943 to 1945) and assistant conductor of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra (from 1944 to 1946), then associate conductor of the London Philharmonic (from 1947 to 1949). He toured as a guest conductor as well, although his U.S. debut did not come until 1957, with the Boston Symphony giving the American premiere of his Symphony No. 2. Although he devoted as much time as he could to composing in the early postwar years -- producing a string quartet (1946), an "Irish" Symphony (1948), the ballet Ambohimanga (1946), and the opera Hécube (1949-1954) -- he was increasingly occupied with conducting, working with the Concerts Lamoureux (from 1951 to 1957), the Israel Philharmonic (from 1957 to 1959), and Düsseldorf Symphony Orchestra (from 1960 to 1966). In 1963, he succeeded Fritz Reiner as head of the Chicago Symphony. Martinon's tenure there was difficult. In five seasons, he conducted 60 works by modern European and American composers, and made a number of outstanding LPs for RCA, mostly of bracing twentieth century repertory in audiophile sound. Chicago's conservative music lovers soon sent him packing.

Martinon jumped at the chance to take over the French National Radio Orchestra in 1968; working with this ensemble, he recorded almost the entire standard French repertory for Erato and EMI. His earlier Erato efforts that focused on such secondary but nevertheless interesting figures as Roussel, Pierné, and Dukas, whereas EMI assigned him integral sets of the Saint-Saëns symphonies and the orchestral works of Debussy and Ravel, among other projects. In 1974, he was appointed principal conductor of the Residentie Orkest in The Hague, but he died before that relationship could bear much fruit.

Martinon resumed his career as a composer around 1960, writing his Violin Concerto No. 2 (1960) for Henryk Szeryng, his Cello Concerto (1964) for Pierre Fournier, and his Symphony No. 4 ("Altitudes"), composed in 1965, for the 75th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony. He acknowledged Prokofiev and Bartók as strong influences on his scores, which meld Expressionism with French Neoclassicism. Martinon continued composing into the 1970s, but he seldom recorded any of his own music, with the notable exceptions of the Second Symphony, "Hymne à la vie" (ORTF, for Barclay Inedits) and Fourth Symphony, "Altitudes" (Chicago SO, for RCA).