Radio Silence

It’s been five years since the Chicago Symphony lost its regular series of radio broadcasts, and a replacement series is nowhere on the horizon. Wynne Delacoma says that the continued lack of any radio presence is directly attributable to stubbornness on the part of the CSO’s musicians and management, who have been loathe to challenge old compensation systems, even as other orchestras embrace new ideas. “Audiences in Chicago and around the world need to hear what the symphony is doing now, not simply what it did 10 or 20 or 30 years ago… It is a crime that [the CSO] is falling so far behind in the world of electronic media.”