These days, there are probably six living conductors who can conjure this orchestra as the highest form of itself. Riccardo Muti, the no-longer-active Wolfgang Sawallisch, Charles Dutoit, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, and Simon Rattle - each has his own take on it.
The sixth, Vladimir Jurowski, is remarkable in a different way. Thursday night, he parsed the orchestra's sound into several distinct, characteristic strata, each one a variant on the orchestra we love. (We await hopefully the arrival of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, being positioned as the orchestra's bringer of jollity starting next season.)
To say there is something mysterious about the sourcing of orchestral sonorities is to engage in unnecessary magical thinking. Ormandy was even more right than his quotation suggests.
"I really believe that there are some conductors who have a sound in their hands," Jurowski told me in 2005, acceding to the metaphysical. "I feel you can achieve colors by just conducting a certain way."
That said, "some orchestras have a tendency to play everything near the fingerboard," he continued. "In some places you must ask them to go closer to the bridge. The placement of the bow and the pace at which you take it, it's a whole science."
These decisions make for startling differences. In the enormous orchestra called for in Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, "Leningrad" - the single work on the current program - Philadelphia was at its polished best. That it sounded so characteristically burnished, even with so many substitute players and recent retirees called back into action, sealed Ormandy's claim.
To note all of the outstanding individual playing would be too space-consuming, but most notable were solos by flutist David Cramer, clarinetists Ricardo Morales and Samuel Caviezel, and percussionist Christopher Deviney. Jurowski granted solo bows generously and with justification.
