A British publication recently affirmed what Chicago Symphony Orchestra audiences already know: the City of Big Shoulders is home to a just-as-hard-working orchestra.
Bachtrack, a classical music online publication, placed the CSO atop its 2025 list of the world’s “busiest orchestras,” counting 140 performances by the orchestra last year. The publication also rounded up the year’s “busiest performers” and “busiest conductors,” with CSO music director designate Klaus Mäkelä placing fourth in the latter list.
The CSO has topped Bachtrack’s list once before, in 2015. Over the 16 years Bachtrack has tracked these calendars, the orchestra typically ranks among its top 5 “busiest” orchestras (also coming in at No. 4 in 2024 and No. 2 in 2023). Mäkelä has also been a routine inclusion since 2022, becoming Bachtrack’s “busiest” and “second-busiest” conductor in 2024 and 2023 respectively.
Bachtrack editor Lawrence Dunn said that the CSO is one of about 50 global arts presenters whose performance calendar is tracked by the website, in an email to the Tribune explaining the list’s methodology. Others — like the Hallé orchestra in Manchester where Dunn lives — share their calendars with Bachtrack directly. In comparison, the Hallé self-reported 69 concerts, half as many concerts as were tracked at the CSO.
“In a broad sense, the rate of performance is a clear indication of orchestral activity and budgeting,” Dunn wrote.
Indeed, if anything, Dunn noted that orchestras “perform a great deal more” than Bachtrack’s annual rankings indicate — which means its findings are generally illustrative, but far from precise. For example, a performance may be omitted if an orchestra is credited under a different name, performs “in a Pops formation,” or only features a subsection of its membership.
When presented with the Bachtrack listing, CSO representatives on both the musician and management side agreed that the ensemble is very, very busy, as far as orchestras go. But their reactions were tempered by some skepticism.
“It is really hard to compare orchestras in this way,” says Vanessa Moss, the CSO’s vice president of orchestra and building operations. “It reminds me of when Chevy Chase was still on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and he would give baseball scores and say, ‘Yankees, one,’ then not say what the other scores were. You don’t know what the numbers are, or how close they are.”
CSO bassoonist Bill Buchman, who chairs the orchestra’s members’ committee, agrees that the comparison is flawed. He notes that the CSO’s Bachtrack stats includes non-subscription series like CSO for Kids, which feature just a subset of full-time CSO musicians. By the same token, it excludes some forthcoming chamber music performances, which likewise use a small subset of the orchestra. It also leaves off any closed-door engagements, like school concerts.
“Does that literally mean a member of the (CSO) does more concerts than a member of one of these other orchestras? It’s a little hard to say,” Buchman says.
Lists like Bachtrack’s aren’t infallible, but they can capture and quantify larger issues.
Overwork is a perennial sticking point in orchestral contracts, particularly in the United States, where sections are led by one principal player who is expected to play the vast majority of concerts. European peers like the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics — just behind the CSO in 2025 at No. 2 and No. 3, respectively — have multiple co-principals who can share the workload.
“I think that was one of the attractions when (principal flutists) Mathieu Dufour and now Stefán Höskuldsson left the Chicago Symphony to go to the Berlin Philharmonic. Even though the pay is slightly lower, the workload is also lower than what is expected of a principal wind player in an American orchestra,” Buchman says. “We are very well compensated for what we do, but we do work very hard for that compensation.”
That workload can also increase the risk of injuries — a going concern for any orchestra with demanding seasons, but particularly in the CSO, which, despite recent string hires, still faces nearly 20 vacancies. Buchman says the CSO’s staffing shortfall keeps its current membership on the clock more often than it had been in seasons past, when musicians more easily rotated off concert cycles.
“There’s a number of reasons why, especially for the string players, it’s become quite an exhausting job. … You need recovery time when you’re doing something that physical, and with a very dense calendar, there’s very little opportunity for recovery time,” he says.
Speaking on behalf of CSO management, Moss tells the Tribune that “the contract is carefully developed to protect musicians from playing too much or not giving them sufficient time off to recover between weeks.” Indeed, some clauses in the CSO musicians’ contract specifically address overwork. The concert loads of second-seat wind and brass players — who, by dint of their roles, are contracted for more services than even principal players — led the orchestra to allow those musicians to take more youth concerts off than their peers.
CSO musicians and management will meet at the negotiating table later this year; the musicians’ current contract expires in September. Data like Bachtrack’s can be provocative fodder for labor negotiations. Buchman says that a colleague already sent him the Bachtrack listing, just hours after it had been published.
“The natural way that someone on the musician side would want to use a statistic like that is to say, ‘Look, we work harder than any other orchestra, and that’s why we should be paid more than any other orchestra,’” he says.
But both Buchman and Moss caution against taking the ranking at face value. Should it be cited in forthcoming negotiations, they said they would seek out their own data: identifying the CSO’s actual service count, then comparing it directly to peer orchestras.
“Any aspect of employment is fair game for discussion and negotiation, including workload,” Moss says. “But I think it’s always important to step back and understand how much time off a musician needs, and what the mechanisms are that a musician is able to get that time off. As long as we’re accomplishing that — safeguarding people’s longevity — then that’s the argument; that’s the real issue at hand.”
Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.
