ALONG THE WAY WE'LL HAVE A COUPLE OF STORIES. BUT
FIRST A FEW WORDS FROM A CERTIFIABLY EXPERT WITNESS
-- Cynthia Phelps, NY Phil principal violist since 1992, quoted at the time of Stanley Drucker's retirement, in 2009, when they'd been fellow principals for 17 years (requoted in a Dec. 2022 posting by the orchestra)
SAY AGAIN, PLEASE, CYNTHIA?
"His unbelievable creativity, his ability to make a moment anytime he has the opportunity"Let's rehear our clip of the first-movement intro, Andante, ma non troppo, leading into the Allegro energico, of the Sibelius First Symphony --
Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Mar. 14, 1967
NOW, WITH OUR EARS ALREADY TUNED TO SIBELIUS --
Let's hear three fine but distinctly different performances of Sibelius's compulsively riveting tone poem En Saga, Op. 9. One is the performance that (in a story I'll tell in a moment) I happened to listen to one day which grabbed hold of my ears and wouldn't let go -- can you guess which? (If you're of a mind to cheat, you can scroll down a bit for the answer.)
En Saga is without program or literary source. Nevertheless, the adventurous, evocative character of the music has encouraged many listeners to offer their own interpretations, among them a fantasy landscape (such as that by the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela [above]), a hunting expedition, a bard's storytelling, and the essence of Finnish people. Sibelius routinely declined to state a program . . . . [In] the 1940s [he] describ[ed] the work as "the expression of a certain state of mind" -- one with an unspecified, "painful" autobiographical component -- for which "all literary interpretations [were therefore] totally alien."
-- from Wikipedia [footnotes onsite]
Scottish National Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Classics for Pleasure-EMI, recorded April 1974
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in the Philadelphia Athletic Club, Jan. 20, 1963
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leif Segerstam, cond. Chandos, recorded in the Danish Radio Concert Hall, Copenhagen, Feb. 25-27, 1991
by Ken
The long blog silence has been far from inactive, and a lot of the musical activity -- and pondering -- sprang from our remembrance-in-progress of the barely comprehensible career of clarinetist Stanley Drucker (1929-2022), who joined the New York Philharmonic as assistant principal in 1948 at the age of 19 and was elevated to principal clarinet in 1961, after which he held that post with unflagging distinction, under five music directors, until his retirement in 2009.
BACK TO EN SAGA -- AND THE STORY OF HOW ONE
OF OUR PERFORMANCES SEIZED CONTROL OF ME
On the day in question, already in a Sibelian frame of mind, I was moved to put on a CD from a reissue set which begings with a performance I didn't recall ever listening to of the Violin Concerto -- a piece I love, and I mean really love. I wasn't listening closely, in part because I really wasn't especially enjoying the performance. Suddenly I noticed that my brain had moved into high alert. On that CD, following the Violin Concerto, is a performance, by totally different performers (believe me, I checked!), of En Saga, another piece I really, really love. Only now my brain was totally captive -- this performance spoke with such fullness and clarity of purpose, not to mention unforced beauty and honest relish, even delight.
I really do like all three recordings we heard at the top of the post. Let's review, starting with Eugene Ormandy -- En Saga is just the sort of orchestral showpiece of which he was such a master.
Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in the Philadelphia Athletic Club, Jan. 20, 1963
There's no room for dawdling on this journey, but there's an abundance of diversely delineated and richly realized character, and with the Fabulous Philadelphians performing at their peak, and the Columbia Masterworks recording team too, I don't think we could ask for a juicier, more invigorating En Saga of the extrovert persuasion.
And an En Saga of the introvert persuasion?
Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Leif Segerstam, cond. Chandos, recorded in the Danish Radio Concert Hall, Copenhagen, Feb. 25-27, 1991
We can guess just from the timings that Leif Segerstam, that pensive Dane, has a very different itinerary in mind for us. The landscape, or mindscape, he paints for us makes for a journey, whether we think of it as physical or metaphysical, that's chillier, more dangerous than usual -- and the piece is only too happy (maybe the wrong choice of word) to support this adventure in morbid anxiety. Certianly the not-quite-climactic late pages, in which the piece seems to be trailing off into oblivion, have never sounded more precarious -- or made more sense.
But the performance that knocked me out . . .
. . . is what was, as far as I know, master Sibelian Alexander Gibson's first recording of En Saga:
Scottish National Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Classics for Pleasure-EMI, recorded April 1974
Here everything seems to go right, and fits together with seemingly effortless ease, projecting in clear, unforced voice the piece's cascading and frequently overlapping musical events with such clarity and fullness that this listener, at least, is kept breathless to hear what comes next.
But I know of two later Gibson recordings, which
both deserve to be heard
Scottish National Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. RCA-Chandos, recorded in Glasgow City Hall, 1977
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Alexander Gibson, cond. Collins Classics, recorded in St. John's, Smith Square, London, August 1989
The later Scottish National Orchestra recording, made only a few years later (if I've got the dates right, which I never take for granted), is different: noticeably more gradual and more, er, sophisticated in its presentation and subtle manipulation of musical events -- I'm tempted to call it "wintry-ish" in tone. I like it a lot, but I'm not sure it would have had the mesmerizing effect the 1974 performance did on the day in question.
The find for me, though, is the 1989 recording, which I'd never heard before. And it's something else. Still fancier than the 1974 performance, but back at approximately the quicker earlier pacing, it now comes with a new confidence and boldness, interpetive and orchestral, while still recalling grace and poise so characteristic of 1974. Wow!
WHILE WE'RE AT IT, THOUGH, I CAN'T RESIST . . .
. . . throwing in some other performances that give us still different kinds of journeys.
London Philharmonic Orchestra (originally credited for contractual reasons as "Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra of London"), Sir Adrian Boult, cond. Vanguard-Amadeo-Nixa(LP)-PRT(CD), recorded c1956
Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Neeme Järvi, cond. DG, recorded in the Konserthuset, Göteborg, December 1992
Philharmonia Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded in Kingsway Hall, March 1981
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Berlin Classics (Deutsche Schallplatten), recorded in the Christuskirche, November 1970
From the two LPs' worth of Tone Poems of Sibelius Sir Adrian Boult recorded c1956, Precision Records & Tapes in 1980 resurrected, as far as I know, a single CD's worth, including this bracingly blunt En Saga. The mono recording sounds almost primitive alongside our other versions, but this kind of fits the performance, which is of a kind of primitive, bluntly striding nature -- very effective in its way.
I've included the performance by Neeme Järvi (who incidentally succeded Sir Alexander as principal conductor of the RNSO in 1984, but stayed in the post only until 1988) because it's such a soul-satisfying blast. Järvi's discography is chock full of Sibelius -- with the Gothenburg Symphony, of which he was principal conductor from 1982 to 2004 -- he recorded two massive compendia of something like the complete orchestral works of Sibelius, first for BIS, then for DG, and I'm sorry to say I know only the three-LP set of nonsymphonic works, and I haven't listened to even that very much. It's now on my "to listen to" list.
GETTING BACK TO GIBSON AND THE GRABBING POWER
OF THAT 1974 EN SAGA: IT WASN'T A TOTAL SURPRISE
Which brings us to another story, of another mind-blowing musical experience -- back in mid-January 1995. (You'll see in a moment how I'm able to date it.) I was working in what my boss called a "shop," more properly a warehouse loft from which he sold, mostly by phone, fax, and mail order, used classical LPs at prices that themselves kind of blew my mind.
One of his specialty categories was "audiophile" LPs -- mostly the highly sought earliest pressings of such labels as RCA Living Stereo, British EMI and Decca, Mercury Living Presence, which I came to appreciate really did sound better than later pressings, not to mention the wretched approximation of musical sound tha came with the CD (which, however, came without the pops, ticks, scratches, and whatnot of increasingly aged LPs).
It so happened that by that day in, you know, mid-January 1995, my boss had -- by virtue of trading components of the shop audio system in and out arrived at a system that was, to my ears, pretty damned gorgeous, and on this particular day it happened to strike my fancy (there must have been a reason, but I'm damned if I can remember what it might have been) to play a record that wasn't the highest-priced but nevertheless commanded fairly high prices whenever my boss offered it for sale: the RCA Living Stereo issue of a recording made by the company's U.K. partner at the time, Decca: the Sibelius Fifth Symphony and Karelia Suite played in 1959 by the London Symphony under -- you must have seen this coming -- Alexander Gibson.
It had always struck me as an improbable title to be so highly prized. I think I was at least skeptical, if not downright cynical. So maybe I saw a copy lying around and thought I might as well once and for all check it out. What I heard was something sort of like this:
London Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Decca-RCA, recorded in Kingsway Hall, Feb. 9-10, 1959
Again, it was only "something like this" -- "this" being, after all, an mp3 file short from my computer over the Internet to however you're getting your connection and through whatever computer audio setup you have, as against my hearing of a high-quality early pressing of RCA LSC-2405 played on that splendid audio system. But I'm still getting something like the feeling I got that day -- in, you know, mid-January 1995.
Which was, well, that this was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. Partly, this is because the opening of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony is one of the most beautiful musical creations ever created. But getting all those delicate pieces to fit together so harmoniously, and in such transparent, luminous recorded sound -- that's a feat, or rather an ensemble of feats.
NOW, ABOUT THAT DATE -- you know, mid-January 1995. I can't remember whether it was that same day when I got home, or the next day, and I can't remember whether I heard it on the radio, or maybe read it in one of the daily newspapers I was schlepping around in those days. "It" was a report that on January 14 the well-known Scottish conductor Sir Alexander Gibson had died.Now I had planned to play some more with this marvel, the opening of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony, and we may yet do it -- but not now. I do still want to get back to the opening of the First Symphony. But we should perhaps at least hear the whole first movement of the Fifth:
SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 5 in E-flat, Op. 82:
i. Allegretto
London Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Decca-RCA, recorded in Kingsway Hall, Feb. 9-10, 1959
WHAT I'M HEARING IS VOICES -- LIKE THE ONE SOUNDED
BY STANLEY DRUCKER AT THE START OF SIBELIUS 1
I'm sure you remember, but I'm afraid I just can't hear it enough.
Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Mar. 14, 1967
It's not just that Stanley D. plays the solo so beautifully. Other clarinetists have played it plenty beautifully, but that he speaks-sings every "syllable" with such minutely detailed, expressively inflected purpose. It's a direct communication with us, communicating this nuanced account of something remarkable happening -- a voice serving notice that even more remarkable things lie in store for us.
I don't mean something as hokey as "the voice of the composer." It's a voice created by the composer, sure, but what I'm hearing is the voice of the piece. Just as what I've been hearing in our multitude of En Saga performances is the sets of voices telling us about this remarkable journey -- whether in a space real or imagined or in a mind -- that's unfolding. And I'm thinking that one of the hallmarks of, for example, Alexander Gibson's greatness as a Sibelius conductor is the communicative power with which he gets his orchestras to articulate those voices, as we've heard both in En Saga and the opening of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony.
With this in mind, let's go back, finally, to the opening movement of the Sibelius First Symphony. We're going to rehear some performances we've already heard along with some others.
SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39:
i. Andante, ma non troppo; Allegro energico
Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. Columbia-CBS-Sony, recorded in Philharmonic Hall, Mar. 14, 1967
You'll recall we've also heard Lenny B.'s rerecording, with the Vienna Philharmonic.
Vienna Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, cond. DG, recorded live in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Singverein, February 1990
Very nice, certainly, but in the clarinet solo I don't hear much beyond a beautifully shaped, expressive reading.
It occurred to me that there's another performance we might want to hear. IN my rummagings around the NY Phil Archives, I was surprised to discover that the first time Sibelius 1 appeared on a Philharmonic program during Stanley D.'s tenure as principal clarinet, the conductor wasn't Lenny B. but Lorin Maazel (who, by chance, would eventually be S.D.'s fifth and final NY Phil music director, when they would in fact again do Sibelius 1 together again.) I think it's safe to assume that Stanley D. was on the job for those April 1965 performances with Maazel -- it's hard to imagine anyting standing between an the principal clarinet of any orchestra and performances of Sibelius 1.
Now it so happens that Maestro Maazel had as recently as September 1963 recorded Sibelius 1 as part of the Sibelius symphony cycle he was doing with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca, and that record had been released in 1964. So you suppose we might hear some connection?
Vienna Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, cond. Decca, recorded in the Sofiensaal, September 1963
Is it my imagination, or does the Vienna principal's phrasing have a certain resonance alongside Stanley D.'s 1967 recording? Still, no, as beautifully as the Vienna clarinetist plays, from note to note there's not much variety in tone formation.
Here's an even more extreme example.
Boston Symphony Orchestra, Colin Davis, cond. Philips, recorded in Symphony Hall, April 1976
Talk about beautiful clarinet playing -- it doesn't get much more beautiful, or more achingly soulful, than the solo of Harold (Buddy) Wright, the Boston Symphony's great principal clarinet from 1970 till his too-early death in 1993, at a mere 66. True, he's not getting any help from his conductor, but once we've heard Stanley D., we know that a major opportunity has been missed here.
Okay, maybe one more, and this time we'll just listen first, and then I'll tell you who the performers were.
Hmm, there's something going on there, don't you think? No, it's not Stanley D., but it's, you know, something. And I like the performance.
So who were we hearing? Well, you remember that outstanding, touching-all-the-bases 1989 En Saga we heard earlier? This is from those same London sessions -- from the same CD, in fact:
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Alexander Gibson, cond. Collins Classics, recorded in St. John's, Smith Square, London, August 1989
WE'LL BE COMING BACK TO SIBELIUS RE. "VOICES," BUT
I THINK FIRST WE'LL FOCUS ON THE VOICE OF STANLEY D.
And those "moments" he made anytime he had the opportunity.
AFTERTHOUGHT: THE WHOLE OF SIBELIUS 1
All the time this post was taking shape, I had it in my mind, after all the picking at the first movement of the Sibelius First Symphony, to slip in the whole symphony -- so we could have a bit more actual musical content. The clip has been waiting, so let's do it. (I'm not going to say anything more about the piece. For guidance, you can turn to the Wikipedia article.)
SIBELIUS: Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39:
i. Andante, ma non troppo -- Allegro energico [at 0:01]
ii. Andante (ma non troppo lento) [at 11:44]
iii. Scherzo: Allegro [at 21:24]
iv. Finale: Quasi una fantasia [at 26:56]
Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Kurt Sanderling, cond. Berlin Classics (Deutsche Schallplatten), recorded in Studio Christuskirche, January 1976
AND THERE ARE LOTS OF PERFORMANCES ON YOUTUBE
For example, if you want to hear the whole of the Sibelius Fifth Symphony, there's a live performance by the Oslo Philharmonic under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, and a more animated one by the Turku Philharmonic under Leif Segerstam. (And a heads-up: We're going to be looking at the opening movement of the Sibelius Second as well. You might take a peek at a 2019 performance by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony under Susanna Mälkki, or this 2002 one by the Oslo Philharmonic under the late, much-missed Mariss Jansons.)
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