By Allan Kozinn

Those who attend orchestral concerts regularly may wonder at some point what the conductor thinks he’s doing, and whether the orchestra might play just as persuasively without him ..... Granted, these thoughts usually occur when the conductor isn’t very good—when one watches in disbelief as sections that have nothing to play are thrown big cues, or when hand and arm gestures bear no resemblance to any aspect of the musical impulse. Even great conductors have raised the question, as Leonard Bernstein once did during a Vienna Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall. As a tribute to the musicians, Bernstein stepped back, folded his arms, and let the Orchestra play the finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 with astonishing precision, and not a gesture from him.

Conductors and their advocates, understandably, argue that only a conducted performance will have a unified, coherent point of view. But the musicians of Orpheus, and the following they have built both on disc and in the concert hall over the last 25 years, can attest that conductor-less performances are not only possible, but can be as interpretively astute as those shaped from the podium. Anyone who knows how Orpheus works will also note, however, that the precise, energetic, and carefully shaped performances for which this 26-member chamber orchestra has become known are the products of an intensive rehearsal process that has evolved over the years.

Orpheus was started in 1972 by Julian Fifer, a cellist who had just completed his studies at Columbia University and the Juilliard School and had started freelancing. Unexcited by the prospect of sitting near the phone between performances, Fifer, who remains the president of Orpheus, rounded up 14 other like-minded recent graduates and presented a program split between chamber and orchestral music—works by Vivaldi, Mozart, Nielsen, Dvorák, and Beethoven—at the Broadway Presbyterian Church, across the street from Columbia.

Fifer had no real role model: there were stories about Persimfans, a conductor-less Soviet orchestra that flourished in the 1920s, but the only contemporary ensembles he knew of that performed conductor-less—the earliest incarnation of the Academy of St. Martin-in-theFields and the Prague Chamber Orchestra—were conducted by their concertmasters. What Fifer and company were after was something more thoroughly democratic. Their idea was that all the works on the program, even the Beethoven Contredanses, which required the full band, should be prepared as if they were chamber music, with plenty of discussion during the rehearsals and all the players having equal say on interpretive matters.

The 15-player ensemble decided to continue its experiment and adopted the name Orpheus when it reassembled, slightly augmented, for a November 1973 performance at what was then Carnegie (now Weill) Recital Hall. That concert, though reviewed favorably in The New York Times, is only a footnote in Orpheus’s history, because for the occasion the ensemble had hired itself out to a young conductor who wanted to present a concert. After the performance, Fifer and his colleagues resolved that when they performed henceforth as Orpheus they would be conductor-less; if they performed with a conductor again, they would not use the Orpheus name.

Orpheus’s official debut, therefore, was a 1974 concert at Alice Tully, presented under the title “Music Minus One,” a play on the name of the old practice recordings that allowed student instrumentalists to play concertos with a recorded orchestral backing. The “Minus One” here, of course, was the conductor. Again the reviews were encouraging, and from there, Orpheus progressed. Fifer and his associates assembled a financial infrastructure, parlaying an initial state grant of $800 into a network of private donors who help cover the cost of an expansive schedule of activities that includes an annual series at Carnegie Hall (since 1978) and regular touring around the world.

The ensemble’s <i>modus operandi</i> matured as well. By the early 1980s, its roster had reached its current complement of 26, and although they are freelancers, membership in Orpheus has been quite steady, with many players from the early years still in the ranks. From the start, hierarchies were avoided: seating revolved constantly, and a new concertmaster was elected for each work. Although the concertmasters gave the downbeats and cues, they effectively executed the interpretations decided upon by the whole group in rehearsal.

Gradually, though, the original notion of complete democracy became unwieldy. A rehearsal of, say, a Rossini overture would be stopped constantly as one player objected to a tempo or a phrasing, and comments led to digressions and debates. To remedy this, representatives from each section were chosen, and this “core,” as the players call it, hammered out the basics of the interpretation before the full rehearsal. Even so, Orpheus players say, there is room for spontaneity, and on their tours, readings change from night to night.

Orpheus’s Carnegie Hall series has been consistently impressive. Its playing has retained both its polish and its freshness. And its repertory has grown nicely. The Classical composers remain firm centerpieces (Orpheus’s Haydn and Mozart are exceptional), but the ensemble has reached backward to the Baroque (its Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi combine the sonic breadth of modern instrumentation and an up-to-date sense of Baroque performing style) and forward into the early Romantics (Beethoven, Schubert, and Mendelssohn) and into the early 20th century (it has given superb performances of Schoenberg, Bartók, Kodály, Rodrigo, and Turina).

There have also been a healthy number of commissions and premieres, among them Lee Hyla’s Trans, Jacob Druckman’s Nor Spell Nor Charm, William Bolcom’s Chamber Concerto, Mario Davidovsky’s Violin Concerto, and horn concertos by Peter Lieberson and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

It is on record, of course, that Orpheus’s reach has been the greatest. After an early series of recordings for Nonesuch and Pro Arte, Orpheus began a relationship with Deutsche Grammophon in 1985 that has yielded a large and impressive catalog. This year it has renewed its ties with Nonesuch for a Mozart concerto series with Richard Goode, and it has just started a relationship with PGM, a new audiophile label.

The recordings capture Orpheus’s strengths nicely. Its series of Haydn symphony recordings, its collection of Mozart wind concertos, and its account of the Vivaldi Four Seasons with Gil Shaham offer a superb introduction to the vigor and textural transparency of the Orchestra’s playing. Its accounts of the Dvorák Serenades, a Schoenberg disc with Verklärte Nacht and the two chamber symphonies, a recent Tchaikovsky program with the cellist Misha Maisky, and a French program (Ravel, Satie, and Fauré) show the considerable warmth and subtlety the band can produce, and overturn any lingering doubts about whether a conductor-less orchestra can produce readings with a distinctive interpretive profile.

What the recordings also show, and what Orpheus’s concert audiences have come to appreciate, is that in resisting the temptations of predictable routine, these players have kept alive for a quarter century Fifer’s original idea of playing orchestral works as if they were chamber music.

Allan Kozinn is a music critic for The New York Times.