Frank Sheppard Squire Welsman

In 1906 Frank Welsman formed a Toronto Conservatory Symphony Orchestra with Bertha Drechsler Adamson as concertmistress and with a personnel made up of staff and students of the Toronto Conservatory of Music. After two successful seasons, the orchestra became more firmly established under a directorial board led by a prominent businessman, H.C. Cox, dropped the direct connection with the conservatory and the "Conservatory" part of its name, and presented a flourishing annual concert series in Massey Hall. Toronto finally had its own regular symphonic orchestra.

The early Welsman years show a predominance of standard late-18th- and 19th-century European music - Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Dvořák's New World Symphony, and symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The third and fourth symphonies of Mendelssohn and the last three of Tchaikovsky were played, but, surprisingly perhaps, none by Brahms. An all-Wagner program was given in 1911. Novelties for the time included symphonies by Goldmark and Kalinnikov and Strauss's Death and Transfiguration. Ballots for a request concert (1913) show that among symphonies the Path�tique was the most popular, among overtures the Midsummer Night's Dream, and among other pieces the Second Hungarian Rhapsody.

Guest artists included many world-renowned musical figures: the violinists Fritz Kreisler, Eug�ne Ysa�e, Carl Flesch, and the 17-year-old Mischa Elman; the pianists Wilhelm Backhaus, Vladimir de Pachmann, and Sergei Rachmaninoff, the latter playing his own Second Concerto; the singers Clara Butt, Johanna Gadski, Alma Gluck, Louise Homer, Leo Slezak, and Ernestine Schumann-Heink. Elgar conducted the touring Sheffield Choir in his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius with the TSO in April 1911, but otherwise neither guest conductors nor works by English composers were much in evidence.

In keeping with the social temper of the era, the concerts may have had a certain class appeal: "Music [had been] an important part of the social and cultural life of well-to-do Toronto in the latter half of the nineteenth century" (Doris Davies, Over the Years). However, pop concerts were added to the schedule at the end of the first TSO season (April 1909), with a uniform admission price of 25 cents. The orchestra travelled to nearby Ontario centres for a few concerts each season. Frank Blachford was the "concertmeister" (as spelled in the program) beginning in that "expansion" season of 1908-9. Leo Smith joined the cello section shortly after his arrival in 1910 and later became principal, as well as program annotator. Other noted members included, in the later seasons, Jack Arthur, Luigi Romanelli, and the young Harry Adaskin.

The TSO weathered the World War I years, but with increasing difficulty (scattered players, curtailment of travel affecting guest artists, waning audience support), and in 1918 it was obliged to discontinue. This first regularly based phase of 11 years (13 counting the two preliminary years under Toronto Conservatory of Music auspices) had provided a professional standard worthy of international-calibre guest artists and a broad, though conservative, repertoire.