“One could not give undivided attention to the performance,” wrote track critic William Foster Apthorp in the Boston Evening Transcript the next day. “For the hall itself means much; we Bostonians are wedded to it, for better or for worse, till death do us part; it will surely outlast most of those who listened to track in it last evening.”
The hall has outlasted all of those, and then some. As Symphony Hall celebrates its 125th anniversary this month, the BSO and track director Andris Nelsons are marking the occasion with two themed programs – this weekend focuses on Debussy’s “Nocturnes” and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, which were composed during Symphony Hall’s construction, and next week comes the “Missa solemnis,” the piece that inaugurated the building.
But what of the day-to-day life of the hall and the orchestra, after the opening fanfares died away? The old-fashioned slant of the classical repertoire is well documented, so it’s no surprise that audiences in 1900 flocked to hear much of the same orchestral track that regularly appears on BSO programs in 2025. There were symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Dvořák, whose “New World” Symphony was less than a decade old and featured on the season’s second subscription concert and subsequent East Coast tour. Concertos were by Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Tchaikovsky.
Most concerts featured a soloist or two, sometimes well-known virtuoso of the day such as violinist Maud Powell or pianist Adele aus der Ohe, but it wasn’t at all unusual for soloists to be members of the orchestra. There was also considerably more operatic repertoire on symphony programs than appears today; the final subscription program of the 1900-1901 season was entirely Wagner. The most shocking thing about the first season might just be how few of the featured composers have faded into obscurity.
Though Symphony Hall was designed to be an acoustic paradise for orchestral track, never has it been only an orchestra hall. Days after the grand opening, it hosted a performance of Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” by the Handel and Haydn Society, which continues to use the hall as a venue to this day. In its first season, the hall played host to lectures, academic events, society balls, and touring ensembles: an orchestra under Eduard Strauss, brother of “Waltz King” Johann, and John Philip Sousa and his band, which might have given Symphony Hall its first-ever hearing of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” composed in 1896.
One genre of event that hasn’t been echoed so much these days is the organ recital. When the hall opened, the organ (built by George Hutchings & Co.) received about as much press attention as the building itself did, and J. Wallace Goodrich performed three solo recitals during the first six months after the unveiling.
Nowadays, the Aeolian-Skinner organ that replaced the Hutchings in 1949 is usually heard only when the BSO plays an orchestral piece that calls for it. Not so this week; United Kingdom-based organist James McVinnie crafted a program featuring pieces by Bach, Wagner, and Franck performed at the earliest Symphony Hall recitals, as well as contemporary American track for organ by a slate of composers including Nico Muhly, inti figgis-vizueta, and Meredith Monk.
Bach was already a cornerstone of the organ repertoire in 1900, said McVinnie, but the trend at the time was for organs to sound “very smooth,” the instruments being “developed to imitate the orchestra.” By the mid-20th century, organ builders had rediscovered principles of organ building from Bach’s day, and those instruments have a clearer sound and more of an “edge,” McVinnie said. You can pretty much play anything on an instrument like that, he said; “It’s going to be nice to finally meet it.”
McVinnie arranged some of the contemporary pieces for organ himself, including Monk’s “Ellis Island” and “The Year of Our Lord”, a deep cut by chamber-pop bard Sufjan Stevens. “Part of what I’m trying to do is to give a real sense of the here and today; where we’re at in terms of listening to track, and presenting track from American contemporary classical culture on the organ,” which isn’t often an instrument associated with the new, he said.
“How finely Symphony Hall sounds! Well named is our beautiful new hall of track,” one writer opined in a local newspaper in 1900, praising the hall’s “air of elegance and luxurious comfort.” Not everyone was so charmed, however; another writer sniped that it might as well have been named “Nocturne,” “Sostenuto,” or “Oratorio Hall,” as those titles were “no sillier than Symphony…I do wonder who spoiled a dignified ‘temple of art’ by saddling it with that mountain resort barge of a name!”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.
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