Rapid hits: Part 4 of 3 -- There's more than one way you can launch a piece with a solo clarinet

Our man in Frankfurt

Once again we hear Stanley Drucker tootling the opening of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, this time in Frankfurt's Jahrhunderthalle, June 8-9, 1976, mere days after the London performance we heard Wednesday (and will hear more of below), in the New York Philharmonic's Bicentennial Tour of Europe with then-laureate conductor Leonard Bernstein.

SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39:
i. Andante, ma non troppo; Allegro energico - opening


Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Mar. 14, 1967

OH YES, WHAT AM I DOING ABOUT THE TECH
WALL I SMASHED INTO ON WEDNESDAY?

Not much. I chickened out of trying to bludgeon my way through it, after posting -- as "Rapid hits: Part 3 of 3 -- Some quick(ish) thoughts on Stanley Drucker (1928-2022)" -- the postable portion of the planned post and promising rapid action on a rehab-and-expansion of the rest. Looking at the positive, this has indeed enabled me to round up a better sampling of Stanley D. performing the most obvious assignment of an orchestra principal: playing solos in orchestral works. It's a grimly grinding project, but I've made progress since Wednesday and I'm still working on it. And I think we can get somewhere by listening to a pair of day-and-night-different clarinet-solo openings.

So in what I guess becomes "Part 4 of 3," we're setting our already-heard opening of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue alongside the singular opening Sibelius crafted for his First Symphony. (In the case of the Sibelius, it has occurred to me that maybe all we needed to do was hear Stanley D.'s chill-inducing performance.)

by Ken

This could just be me, but I hear either of these mind-enflaming orchestral openings and what I want to hear -- next-most to what comes next in each piece, of course -- is a repeat of the opening, again and again. In the case of the Gershwin Rhapsody, we're going to have the fixings for doing that -- over and over and, well, over and over. In the case of Stanley Drucker's riveting performance of the 28-bar opener of the Sibelius First Symphony, marked Andante, I have just this one performance, but that doesn't stop me from clicking to hear it over and over.

It's just 28 bars in all: the first 16 with the solo A clarinet singing its mournful song over a hushed but relentless single-note timpani roll, marked by a couple of swells and fadebacks; the remaining 12 bars entrusted solely to the clarinet, dying away (yes, it's marked "morendo") from pp to ppp, until the startling intrusion of the second violins with a tremolo-like repeated note (well, pair of notes) of their own, kick-starting the movement's main Allegro energico -- marked, interestingly, mf, only moderately loud. Sibelius means to build us a climax, and a whopper of a climax it's going to be.


A FEW WORDS ABOUT LENNY B. AND SIBELIUS

Although Leonard Bernstein had an important, and extremely interesting, couple of decades' worth of music-making ahead of him when he stepped down from the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, by which time his career was already shifting emphasis to Europe, with assorted pursuits in various locations, the recorded legacy he and the New York Phil had built up remains an enormously rich one. Among those riches, not the least was the Sibelius symphony cycle they recorded for Columbia Masterworks. I don't know that anyone had Lenny pegged as a budding Sibelian, I don't know of any conductor who has more completely entered into Sibelius's particular musical universe and made its multitude of dimensions more fully his own.

I like to think that most music lovers are aware of how competely he made the NY Phil a (if not the) preeminent Mahler orchestra, but his affinity for Mahler by contrast seems easy to explain, in terms of the correspondences -- in both the darknesses and lights -- between their backgrounds and personalities. Sibelius's sound and thought world is strikingly different, but it has its darknesses and lights too, and Lenny not only understood them and made them personal to him but also made them personal to the orchestra. And I think Stanley D.'s haunting performance of the Andante, ma non troppo of Sibelius 1 is both an evidence of this and an agent of it.

A smart conductor, and especially a music director, who has such a particular relationship with the orchestra, understands the importance of the orchestra principals in imbuing the whole orchestra with his/her outlook on the music under consideration. S.D. in nearly 50 years as the Philharmonic's principal clarinet, and in that time, with his combination of technical mastery of his instrument, wide- and deep-ranging musical sympathies, communicative skills, and appreciation of his role in the orchestra, he made most if not all the music directors he served comfortable thinking of him as their "clarinet guy."


LET'S TAKE A FULLER LISTEN TO THE 1ST MOVEMENT
OF SIBELIUS 1 -- THERE ARE AUDIBLE LESSONS HERE

Lessons about what makes not just a great clarinetist but a great orchestral clarinetist -- maybe even something about what makes a great conductor.

I want to begin with an opporturnity for easy rehearing of just the opening of the movement, before moving on to the whole of it, after which you'll note that I've tacked on Lenny B.'s 1990 Sibelius 1 remake with the Vienna Philharmonic, his last Sibelius recording and one of his last recordings. It brought him four-sevenths (Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 7) of the way through a second complete Sibelius symphony cycle, which I imagine he expected he would be able to complete in due course.

The legendary Saul Goodman (1907-1996) in 1938

In the Andante, ma non troppo I would call attention to the assertive, menace-laden contribution of timpanist Saul Goodman, nearling the end of his 46-year tenure (1926-72) as Philharmonic principal timpanist.

SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39:
i. Andante, ma non troppo; Allegro energico (opening)


And now the whole movement:

Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Mar. 14, 1967

Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Singverein, February 1990

Clearly after more than two decades Lenny B. was hearing, shall we say, other things in the music, and the Vienna peformance is quite lovely. The soloist is presumably Ernst Ottensamer, who was Vienna Phil principal from 1983 till his death from a heart attack in 2017, leaving behind his son Daniel, who was already a principal clarinet alongside his father, and Daniel's brother Andreas (born 1986) has been a principal clarinet of the Berlin Philharmonic since 2011.

All that said, the Vienna clarinetist in Lenny's DG Sibelius 1, beautifully as he plays, displays hardly any of the tonal and emotional range that makes S.D.'s performance so gripping.


READY TO RETURN TO RHAPSODY IN BLUE?

In the booklet for the Teldec Fasil Say: Gershwin CD on which the Turkish pianist plays not just a generous selection of shorter solo pieces but the Rhapsody and "I Got Rhythm" Variations with Kurt Masur and the New York Phil, the following quote appears:

And I'd be surprised if any listener who's heard any of S.D.'s Rhapsody performances has come away unmoved by it.


Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, piano and cond. Live performance from the Royal Albert Hall, London, June 3-4, 1976 [Watch here.]

Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, piano and cond. Live performance from the Jahrhunderthalle (Centennial Hall), Frankfurt, June 8-9, 1976 [Again, watch here.]

Stanley Drucker, clarinet; Gary Graffman, piano; New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, cond. CBS-Sony, released 1979

Stanley Drucker, clarinet; Fazil Say, piano; New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded in Avery Fisher Hall, December [12&15?] 1998

Kurt Hiltawski, clarinet; Siegfried Stöckigt, piano; Gewandhaus Orchestra (Leipzig), Kurt Masur, cond. Deutsche Schallplatten-DG, recorded in the Kongresshalle, Leipzig, June 26, 1975

So, we've heard S.D. Rhapsod-izing with three of his Philharmonic music directors, and it's only fitting that we have two performances with the first of them, even though, as far as I can recall, as often as they likely performed the piece together, they never made a commercial recording of it together -- though DG did release a DVD with the video recording of the 1976 Albert Hall performance. This lends special importance to both video performances I've encountered from the Philharmonic's 1976 "Bicentennial Tour": the London one and the days-later one from Frankfurt.

They're both special. As regard's S.D.'s playing, listen to the famous opening upward slide in the London performance and hear the easy, seemingly effortlesly controlled beauty of the sustained note into which the slide resolves. The Frankfurt perfomance seems to have caught Lenny in an exceptionally open and expansive, while still quite intense, frame of mind.

I don't get much nuance in the Graffman-Mehta performance, but there may have been some consideration of what might be suitable for use in a film soundtrack, since the LP's worth of Gershwiniana that Mehta was collaborating on was recorded for use in Woody Allen's Manhattan. It's also far from S.D.'s happiest account. Graffman seems to have some interesting ideas about a stricter classical approach to the more structured sections.

Fazil Say gives an honest enough account of the Rhapody, with some attractive detail. Kurt Masur sounds well New York-ified, while bringing his own perspective on the piece, and the orchestra is highly responsive -- a really nice job. In case anyone imagined that Gershwin was a musical entity Masur had to "acquire" in his time in New York, I've thrown in, in both excerpt and full-length form, the recording of the Rhapsody he made back in Leipzig. Neither he nor pisnist Siegfried Stöckigt (nor clarinetist Kurt Hiltawski sounds entirely "inside" the assorted idioms Gershwin deploys, but they come pretty darned close -- the piece plays.


NEXT UP -- in er, Part 5 of 3:
We finish our quick focus on Stanley Drucker
(I'm thinking as Sunday's post?)