Continuing our remembrance: Part 1 of [I think] 3
Final pages of "Pines of the Gianicolo" -- with Stanley Drucker & nightingales
A CLARINET VET'S TOP 10 [or 11] CLARINET SOLOS"As a 34-year veteran of the CSO, I am often asked what music I particularly like. With that in mind, I've devised a list of my top ten favorite orchestral clarinet solos." -- Charlotte Symphony clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld, on the CSO's Sound of Charlotte Blog, Nov. 2020
In his blogpost, A.R. presented his "Top 10 Orchestral Clarinet Solos" -- really 11, with the inclusion of an "honorable mention" that rates pretty high in the "wow!" department -- illustrated with YouTube clips generally cued to the moment of clarinetic takeoff. In this series of posts we'll have A.R. introduce the 11 solos, which we'll hear played mostly by our guy Stanley D.
by Ken
During the long Sunday Classics blog silence -- which we're not going to talk about (right?) except to note that it was caused, as you probably realized, by those gosh-darn supply-chain issues -- one of the first things I actually did was a version of the journey we're now, finally, undertaking, through Allan Rosenfeld's Top 10 (or 11) Orchestral Clarinet Solos. One curious evolution I witnessed (more or less as a spectator!) was a shift of emphasis from Stanley Drucker himself to, well, the music. Lots of music. Until, as we now experience on the journey, there's lots of music that has very little directly to do with Stanley D., unless we count the zillions of performances he participated in.
Which, come to think of it, isn't that different from the turns some other of my musical remembrances took, as with soprano Margaret Price and bass John Macurdy. And this, I kept telling myself as I watched this evolution and expansion, was kind of Drucker-esque, in that his in-all-ways-remarkable career seemed so squarely focused on the music.
At the time of his retirement, in 2009, and then again after his death, in December, we were inundated with mind-boggling number. If I'm remembering correctly, the NY Phil's statsfolks reported not just that in his 61 years with the orchestra (49 of them as principal clarinet), he played in 10,700 concerts, but that this number represented, as of the time of his retirement, some 70 percent of all the concerts the orchestra had ever given.
I KEEP WONDERING WHAT A CATALOG OF ALL THE
WORKS STANLEY D. PLAYED IN WOULD LOOK LIKE
Just think of those 61 seasons, for a performer who I don't believe was known as a performance-shirker, and try to imagine the total number of works, and the range of repertory, not to mention the number of times a large number of those works would have cropped up over that long a time -- including a number of the works on Allan Rosenfeld's list. I doubt that he was prone to coasting on previous performances when a work he'd played before -- even played frequently -- turned up on a program.
Think just of Mahler! Eventually, when we contemplate Stanley D. not as orchestral soloist but as actual soloist, we're going to hear him say, in talking about the Copland Clarinet Concerto, a work dear to the heart of all clarinetists (how many concertos of this quality do they have?), and especially so to Stanley D. (just with the NY Phil he played it 64 times!), speaking about the work's opening section: "Certainly the first part of the concerto is very soulful. It evokes perhaps a Mahler slow movement, before all the excitement enters."
It's hard to imagine that any clarinetist who could have played more than a fraction of the Mahler Stanley D. did. Remember, all five NY Phil music directors he served as principal clarinet -- of course Lenny B. (till 1969, and thereafter laureate conductor), Pierre Boulez (1971-77), Zubin Mehta (1978-91), Kurt Masur (1991-2002), and Lorin Maazel (2002-09) -- were passionate about Mahler, and think how many guest conductors tried to wangled him onto their programs. (This is one reason I made a point of slipping in some Stanley D. Mahlerizing last week.)
SO LET'S GET STARTED ON "THE LIST"
Which in now-traditional "Top 10" form runs from No. 10 on down, or rather up. In this post we'll get down/up to No. 8.
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RESPIGHI: Pines of Rome:A.R., you'll note, specifies the fading-away solo (with the recorded bird call) at the end of the movement commemorating the pines of the hill of Gianicolo (or Janiculum), but we're going to hear the whole movement, which after all also begins with a clarinet solo.
end of "Pines of the Janiculum"
A.R.: "Respighi effectively highlights the tremendous ppp (pianississimo, or "very very quiet") capabilities of the instrument. As the clarinet sound floats away, a recording of a nightingale can be faintly heard."
RESPIGHI: Pines of Rome:
iii. Pines of the Gianicolo (Janiculum): Lento
[final clarinet solo at 6:11] Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Feb. 17, 1970
[final clarinet solo at 5:34] Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. From the Young People's Concert The Anatomy of a Symphony Orchestra, video-recorded in Philharmonic Hall, originally broadcast May 24, 1970
[Note that the YPC performance -- in TV sound, remember -- is a bit quicker and lighter.]
Pining for the rest of the Pines of Rome?
Yes, we're going to hear the whole of Pines of Rome, not once but twice, in a pair of Pines of Rome performances that I think will be instructive as well as enjoyable. You can read about Pines of Rome on Wikipedia, but there's something else you should take in if you can: the Young People's Concert devoted to the piece which Lenny B. scheduled in the same NY Phil season in which he played (and recorded) it, using the piece to catalog the resources of a symphony orchestra.
In the May 1970 Young People's Concert The Anatomy of a Symphony Orchestra (which you can watch at the link), Stanley D. demonstrates his instrument for Maestro Bernstein.
Pines of Rome is one of the rare cases of a work whose compact length and episodic structure enabled the maestro to provide ear-expanding commentary for all four movements and then a complete performance. It'll change the way you listen to Respighi. (You can also read a transcript here.)
What we're going to hear --
is a pair of performances recorded five-plus years apart in the same venue (Carnegie Hall) by essentially the same orchestra (the Symphony of the Air was a major portion of the NBC Symphony striving to stay alive after NBC pulled the plug) under two very different legendary conductors. Even in 1953 mono, Toscanini's performance sounds bracing and lively; that there isn't an abundance of orchestral color may be more a function of what was heard in Carnegie Hall that day than of the engineering. Of course those five-plus years also made a big difference in recording technology, and Stokowski's performance, while hardly laggardly, comes with pretty vivid orchestral coloring.
i. Pines of the Villa Borghese: Allegretto vivace; Vivace
ii. Pines Near a Catacomb: Lento
iii. Pines of the Gianicolo (Janiculum): Lento
iv. Pines of the Appian Way: Tempo di marcia
[ii. at 2:35; iii. at 9:09; iv. at 15:57] NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini, cond. RCA, recorded in Carnegie Hall, Mar. 17, 1953
[ii. at 2:42; iii. at 8:25; iv. at 14:50] Symphony of the Air, Leopold Stokowski, cond. United Artists-EMI, recorded in Carnegie Hall, Dec. 13, 1958
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TCHAIKOVSKY: Francesca da Rimini"Andante cantabile non troppo" section, with lead-up:
A.R.: "I love Tchaikovsky for his truly memorable melodies. This one especially shows off the expressive qualities of the instrument."
[clarinet solo at 1:01] Stanley Drucker with NY Phil, L. Bernstein, cond.
And the whole thing --
TCHAIKOVSKY: Francesca da Rimini
(symphonic fantasia), Op. 32
[our clip: roughly 8:31-13:19; clarinet solo at 9:31] New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Manhattan Center, Oct. 31, 1960
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BRAHMS: Symphony No. 3:
opening of second movement
A.R.: "Gorgeous! You can hear in this solo with woodwind chorale that Brahms had a particular fondness for the sound of the clarinet, and he knew just how to make it sing."
Stanley Drucker & NYP colleagues, Leonard Bernstein, cond. April 1964
Stanley Drucker & NYP colleagues, Kurt Masur, cond. May 1993
An interesting case, because here the clarinet functions both as a soloist and as part of a quartet "chorale," standing out, though, because as the top voice it carries the melody. I expect S.D. had more fun in Bernstein's more overtly expressive approach, not only here but in the rest of the movement. In the "solo," for example, Masur seems to be working for a more proper chorale of the paired clarinets and oboes. The first clarinet naturally stands out as "first among equals." I'm guessing that in both cases S.D. was giving the conductors what they wanted.
So what about the whole movement?
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90:
ii. Andante
New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Manhattan Center, Apr. 17, 1964
New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded live in Avery Fisher Hall, May 1993
Above, I described Lenny B's approach as "more overtly expressive." If this suggests "effect-driven," I think that's kind of what I had in mind. Brahms 3, however, always seems to me the most secretive of the Brahms symphonies, more a scene of "covert" than of overt action, which made me want to hear LB's later recording. I happen to have it handy!
Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Vienna Musikverein, Feb. 23, 1981
Hmm, the Vienna performance is a little slower, yes, but the general profile is fairly similar, no? I do think, though, that the Vienna performance is somewhat less nakedly "emotive."
Anyone else feeling a yen to hear all of Brahms 3?
I was thinking, maybe a performance I've had on my shelves since time immemorial and had hardly ever, if ever, listened to. I thought of this Italian broadcast performance by the nutty Romanian cult-conductor Sergiu Celibidache, from a two-concert traversal of the four Brahms symphonies in Milan in March 1959 -- a conductor with a passionate following who's never much interested me -- I've never heard the kinds of illuminating insights his follower seem to. Still, this was a chance to hear what he made of Brahms 3, at least on this day in Milan.
And I was pleasantly surprised. The performance seems to grow out of a deep love for the piece, something that so often proves more a hindrance than a help to bringing a piece to life, but in this case it seems to me to breathe life into a piece that can be trickier to sustain than one might suppose. Listen to the gently effusive way Celibidache introduces the first movement's secondary theme (at 1:10), but even before that note how smoothly he transitions to it.
BRAHMS: Symphony No. 3 in F, Op. 90:
i. Allegro con brio
ii. Andante [at 9:03]
iii. Poco allegretto [at 19:17]
iv. Allegro [at 25:36]
RAI Symphony Orchestra, Milan, Sergiu Celibidache, cond. Live performance from the Conservatorio "Giuseppe Verdi," Mar. 20, 1959
NEXT UP: No. 7, "One of the greatest clarinet solos in opera literature, from one of the most readily recognizable Italian arias"
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