Future Plans for the Atlanta Symphony (As of 1984)
GP: The Atlanta Symphony: you’ve done a great job. Where do you go from here now? Do you have a plan for down the road?
RS: Well what we’re – yeah, sure, sure we’ve got a plan. First we’ve got a plan for a new summer facility which we hope we can bring.
GP: I’ve heard about that. Outside of the city? Like Tanglewood?
RS: Yeh, yeh, very much like Tanglewood. Fortuitously, we hope substantially within Fulton County, though at the very northern most edge of it.
And obviously we have to bring our budget up to the standards of New York and Philadelphia and Cleveland so that we can hold our star players. We’ve lost our last three principal oboists to the Metropolitan and Cleveland Orchestra and New York Philharmonic. And If we’re going to play major league ball, we’ve got to have major league players. So those are the goals.
Already with these recordings and with the sort of disciplines that Mr. Lane and others have brought to our orchestra, many of them inherited from Szell, this orchestra has a uniquely disciplined classicism. The music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn and there may be no other - being vulgarly vain about it - there may be no orchestra playing as well as this orchestra plays that repertoire. But, to play Strauss and to play the symphonic language of the late Nineteenth Century and the Twentieth Century, we need more players and we need players who can create that sort of sound.
GP: You’ve got to stop the training ground here and make this the home for a lot of these people. A lot of cities are like that, especially in broadcasting. They’ll go to Atlanta or Cincinnati or somewhere, and then they’ll go to New York and then you’ve lost them.
RS: And obviously, the third goal is that we have to take our international tours very soon now, so that the people back home will appreciate what’s going on.