When the last notes of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 died away at Orchestra Hall, nobody moved. Klaus Mäkelä, the conductor who will soon become the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 11th music director, held the silence—nearly a minute, maybe more—while 2,500 people sat suspended after 90 minutes of difficult, existential music.

Beside me, my guest for the evening, a former college orchestra bassist, didn’t know the piece well. He had leaned forward through the final Adagio, hand on his chin, hanging on every note. Phillip Huscher, the orchestra’s program annotator for 39 years, was in the hall too. For three days, he had braced for the cough that would break the spell. It never came. “Everyone was holding their breath,” he told me later.

That evening was a preview of the next chapter in a story Huscher knows better than anyone. After all, he wrote the first comprehensive history. Huscher’s new book, Passing the Baton: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Music Directors Who Shaped Its Greatness, opens with Mäkelä’s appointment and closes looking ahead to his tenure—the latest handoff for an institution soon to turn 135. For Huscher, the transition from one music director to the next is the steady drumbeat of the history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Published in September, Passing the Baton is the first comprehensive history of the CSO in more than 100 years, detailing the tenures of all ten of its music directors. Huscher spent 12 years working on the project, digging into archival materials and mixing them with his own memories of titans like Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti. The more he dug, the more he realized this would be no simple story to tell.

Between its Mäkelä bookends, Huscher traces an institution deeply embedded in Chicago’s cultural and musical history. Along the way, he challenges some of the city’s most stubborn stereotypes about itself and its orchestra.

The idea for the book began modestly. Huscher was asked to write a handout for board members and staff to ground them in CSO history. “At that point,” Huscher recalls, “we were the only major American orchestra that didn’t have a published biography. We had a book that was published in 1924.” Huscher soon realized there was far more to this story than anyone usually talked about.

There is a version of CSO history that leans heavily on the fabled sound—precise, brass-forward, powerful and boldly colored. There are the Grammys won by Georg Solti and Fritz Reiner’s famous Richard Strauss recordings. And there are the personalities: both exacting, but not necessarily quick to praise. 

Then there is the history shaped by Chicago’s “second city” complex, felt keenly by generations of civic leaders, music fans and critics who have striven to be taken as seriously as their counterparts in New York and the great European capitals.

Huscher’s book argues that these caricatures miss the institution’s complexity. “We just talk about it in very conventional terms: the glory of the Reiner recordings, the triumph of Solti, and all that,” he explained during an interview at the Drake Hotel, where Solti himself lived intermittently during his Chicago years.

“All of which is true. But there’s so much more, and it makes the story so much richer and much more interesting, even the complexities and the difficulties. The blaring brass, the Germanic sound, the second city complex. It’s a much more nuanced story than that. The repertoire is much more complex than that.”

To Huscher, that complexity came into focus as he spent a significant amount of time exploring the Rosenthal Archives, the orchestra’s vast repository housed in Chicago Symphony Center. The archive contains personal letters, administrative memos, board minutes, annotated scores, oral histories and scrapbooks. The sheer volume of material was initially daunting. “In the very beginning, I was so overwhelmed by the amount of material that I thought, ‘How am I going to do this?’” Huscher admitted. 

“I think I probably went through an entire year of just kind of panicking as I continued to work without any concept of how I would ever harness all of this stuff into a book.” Working around his full-time duties writing program notes, he moved box by box through decades of records, discovering that each document opened new avenues of inquiry.

One often-overlooked aspect of the CSO’s history is its commitment to new music, carried out through premieres and by its music directors. Under Frederick Stock, the orchestra premiered Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and introduced American audiences to Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Daniel Barenboim threw himself into the music of Elliott Carter, championing the American’s rigorous but not easy to hear works. More recently, Riccardo Muti elevated a generation of 21st-century voices, Missy Mazzoli, Jessie Montgomery and Samuel Adams, choosing them from blind readings of their scores and then finding in their music a “spiritual substance” that moved him.

For longtime followers of classical music and the CSO, the Solti and Reiner years are canonical. Solti’s explosive energy and unabashedly romantic style typified the “Solti Sound.” Reiner’s unforgiving leadership and zero-tolerance attitude yielded legendary recordings that audiophiles still revere today. Yet the most illuminating sections of Passing the Baton focus on the less celebrated, frequently misunderstood tenures that fell around these famous reigns.

Building on the foundations laid by Theodore Thomas, Frederick Stock led the orchestra for 37 years. Stock built a highly disciplined ensemble and programmed contemporary works aggressively, including the music of Richard Strauss. When Strauss visited Chicago on tour in 1921, he was surprised to find an American orchestra that knew his complex scores intimately, precisely because Stock had insisted on playing them regularly.

Stock’s death, however, ushered in a decade of instability. “From 1942 to 1953, that decade was really a difficult time for this orchestra,” Huscher noted. “Three different music directors, none of them lasted more than four years. One of them lasted about four minutes.” The tenures that followed revealed an orchestra capable of world-class playing, yet vulnerable to administrative discord and artistic mismatches.

Rafael Kubelík, who arrived in 1950 at the age of 36, was a conductor of exceptional musical sensitivity who led the orchestra in landmark recordings for Mercury Records. Yet his inexperience alienated patrons and local critics. “Kubelík’s great downfall is that he was a new conductor and the repertoire was new to him,” Huscher observed. He lasted only three seasons. 

Artur Rodziński’s “four minutes,” a single season between 1947 and 1948, was even more tumultuous. Huscher describes him as an electrifying conductor who formed an unusually close bond with audiences despite his erratic temperament. His artistic ambitions quickly ran afoul of the orchestra’s board of trustees. During his short stay, he mounted a concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde featuring the legendary soprano Kirsten Flagstad. The production was a critical triumph but a financial disaster that strained relations with management beyond repair. “That’s one performance I really wish I had heard,” Huscher said. 

Perhaps the most unjustifiably forgotten leader in the orchestra’s history is Jean Martinon, the French composer and conductor who served as music director from 1963 to 1968. Sandwiched between the celebrated Reiner and Solti eras, Martinon is often dismissed. Huscher’s book paints a very different picture.

“It was a surprise to me what an intelligent musician he was, what a wonderful programmer he was, and what a wide range of music he was interested in,” Huscher says. “Partly because he was a composer, so he had an understanding of newer music. But it just surprised me that he was so overlooked, so quickly.”

Martinon fell out of favor with musicians, including legendary principal oboist Ray Still, who lost so much respect for the conductor that he listened to a radio broadcast of a Dodgers game during rehearsal. Despite these tensions, Martinon left behind a body of recordings that reveals an ensemble of extraordinary flexibility. His 1966 recording of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 remains a classic, capturing a fierce, lean intensity that contrasts sharply with the CSO’s stereotypical sound.

What makes Passing the Baton especially striking is how it weaves the orchestra’s story directly into the fabric of Chicago. The narrative grounds itself in local spaces, from Georg Solti’s aforementioned residence at the Drake Hotel to a succession of proposed, but never built. downtown halls sparked by frustration with Orchestra Hall’s acoustic flaws. Crucially, Huscher highlights the CSO’s historic arc of public outreach, beginning with community performances by Frederick Stock at the Union Stockyards, through to Daniel Barenboim and Riccardo Muti’s South Side concerts, and continuing today with community concerts throughout the city and region. If the orchestra was courting audiences in the neighborhoods, it was also being judged in print, and no one judged it more publicly than Claudia Cassidy.

Cassidy, the Chicago Tribune critic whose acerbic prose could make or break a podium career, is the most consequential of those judges. Huscher treats her with care, acknowledging her fierce desire to see a world-class ensemble in Chicago while showing how her crusade was often entangled in orchestra politics. In Huscher’s telling, she emerges not merely as a local bogeywoman but as a central, complicated architect of the orchestra’s turbulent mid-century identity.

Huscher believes CSO history is fundamentally a dialogue between an orchestra, its artistic leadership and the community. And he makes no apologies for the accessible tone he takes in Passing the Baton. “The public, I think, needs to know what the Chicago Symphony is.”

To Huscher, the orchestra is an institution whose history is inseparable from the cultural history of Chicago. “If we care about our culture,” he says, “we should pay attention to the few great treasures we have and do everything we can to help them, to support them and to become interested in them.”

The morning after that Mahler performance, reading Passing the Baton, I kept thinking about the silence in Orchestra Hall, Klaus Mäkelä perfectly still. I found myself thinking about all the music that came before that moment and all the conductors, musicians, critics and audiences who have carried the orchestra through its history. Mäkelä will soon take his place among them. Huscher’s book makes clear just how much history comes with the baton.

Originally published at Third Coast Review

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Passing the Baton Playlist

While reading Huscher’s book, I found myself constantly reaching for my cd player to revisit the recordings he references. The real joy, was discovering treasures I’d either missed when they were first released or dismissed because of historical sound quality.