Victory's musical prestige was elevated by both Richard Rodgers's participation and the enlistment of the NBC Symphony's instrumentalists. Though America's network broadcasters had all employed staff musicians for radio and then television, the NBC Symphony had come to be—from a national perspective—America's most pedigreed orchestra, its name synonymous with principal conductor Arturo Toscanini since the late 1930s.

Toscanini (1867–1957) had led the New York Philharmonic from 1929 to 1936 following operatic posts at La Scala and the Metropolitan Opera. He then retired from the Philharmonic and relocated to Italy, but NBC's David Sarnoff sought his return to New York, sending Samuel Chotzinoff to Milan in 1937 to lure Toscanini. The conductor insisted upon an ensem-ble with at least seventy-six players, and of virtuosity not to be outshone by either the Philharmonic or the orchestras of Philadelphia and Boston. The corporation then committed to forming a newly auditioned ensemble for the prized conductor, offering tempting players’ salaries. Thus began the mys-tique of the “all-new” NBC Symphony Orchestra, and it's a telling measure of NBC's publicity that, by the time of Toscanini's first NBC broadcast, 39.9 percent of Americans polled had recognized his name, and of those more than 70 percent could identify him as an orchestral conductor.

In March 1937, at Toscanini's urging, NBC had hired Artur Rodzinski, then leading the Cleveland Orchestra. While maintaining his Cleveland post, Rodzinski would partner with Chotzinoff in auditioning players for NBC's upgraded ensemble. Candidates included many NBC staffers plus about 700 interested members of other orchestras or chamber units. Some ninety-two musicians were selected to sit before Toscanini, well more than his stipu-lated minimum. The gesture wasn't magnanimous, however, as AFM nego-tiations had led to the enlargement of NBC's total New York music staff from seventy-four positions in 1937 to 115 musicians a year later. Thus, as Fortune magazine neatly explained, “N.B.C. was not giving him more than it was going to have to hire anyway.” Nonetheless, the “new” aggrega-tion involved considerable added cost to NBC because of the many salaries exceeding the union minimum of $105 weekly—at a time when a dollar's purchasing power was twenty times today’s. The generous wages brought many top talents to NBC, with concertmaster Mischa Mischakoff lured from Chicago for a reported $450 weekly and the ten next-highest chairs averag-ing nearly $300.