Among American orchestras, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra has historically rated somewhere in the middle. Not regarded as great, but certainly not bad. With 76 musicians and a current budget of $13 million, it's not remarkably big, but not especially small.

Situated between the mighty New York Philharmonic and the acclaimed Philadelphia Orchestra, the 82-year-old NJSO has operated in relative obscurity, playing a part-time concert season in seven venues around the state.

Former president and chief executive officer Lawrence Tamburri, now with the Pittsburgh Symphony, once called the NJSO "the hardest orchestra in the U.S. to run."

	At the Museo Stradivariano visitors view artifacts like thsese tools from Antonio Stradivari himself.

"We compete with Philadelphia and New York," Tamburri said in September 2000. "We present ourselves in seven locations, and the market is totally different in Princeton than it is in Red Bank. You can't sell an orchestra like soap. You have to be evangelical, to win the audience over."

The NJSO has survived labor strikes and strife, near-bankruptcies, the 1967 Newark riots and, for much of its history, the lack of an attractive, acoustically suitable home.

Starting in the 1940s, the NJSO performed at Newark Symphony Hall, a once-magnificent building that, like the neighborhood around it, went slowly into decline. By the 1970s, the concert hall was hurting the orchestra more than it was helping. The acoustics had deteriorated. The roof leaked. The crowds dwindled.

The turnaround began in the early 1990s, spurred by Tamburri and Victor Parsonnet, a cardiac surgeon who had been installed as chairman of the board of trustees.

Together, Parsonnet and Tamburri rewrote the orchestra's bylaws, increased the board's membership to 50 from 30 and focused on fund-raising. They solidified financial commitments from longtime corporate donors such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, the Prudential Foundation, AT&T and First Union National Bank. Parsonnet called on old friends, from Gov. Thomas Kean to philanthropist Raymond Chambers, to assure them the orchestra wanted to be part of a larger recovery plan for Newark.

The opening of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in 1997 was a great boon. The orchestra acquired greater visibility and superb acoustics. Statewide subscriptions doubled. The NJSO's musical reputation also rose under charismatic conductor Zdenek Macal, who led a series of admirable performances and recordings.

But building a better orchestra is often a decades-long, financially demanding process. Orchestras are judged not just by their sound but by their size, the number of recordings they make and their ability to tour internationally.

If the NJSO were to emerge from the middle of the pack, it would need to do something more.

In the spring of 2002, Herbert Axelrod, a valued patron of the orchestra, offered that something, an audacious proposal to forever change the symphony's sound and standing in the world.

For a bargain-basement price, he would sell it his unparalleled collection of rare strings.