Still remembering Stanley Drucker (who's got me hearing voices -- including a lot from one source)

ALONG THE WAY WE'LL HAVE A COUPLE OF STORIES. BUT
FIRST A FEW WORDS FROM A CERTIFIABLY EXPERT WITNESS

"I think the thing I'll miss most about Stanley is his unbelievable creativity, his ability to make a moment anytime he has the opportunity."

-- 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 --

In Philharmonic Hall, c1967 [photo by Harry Bial, NY Phil Archives]

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 as visualized by painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931), born in the same year as Sibelius -- they shared what curator and art historian William L. Coleman has described as "a complex creative friendship."

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

Listening back to Otto Klemperer's "Così fan tutte" recording

Klemperer with his Così score at the time of the recording

by Ken

As I indicated in Friday night's preview, today we're going to listen again to a little of the recording that Otto Klemperer made of Mozart's Così fan tutte," in celebration of sorts of this lovely recording's overdue reissue by EMI.

We actually did a more comprehensive listen-through to chunks of this recording in the March 2011 post "Remembering Margaret Price, Part 3 -- as Mozart's Fiordiligi," and I've begun replacing the original audio clips for that post, made from my German-pressed LPs, with clips from the (pretty good) new CD issue. As I've said, it's not among my very favorite recordings of the opera, but as I indicated in writing about it for The Metropolitan Opera Guide to Recorded Opera, in this case most of Klemperer's special insights have been intuited by other conductors on records -- among whom my clear favorite remains Eugen Jochum in his near-miraculous 1962 DG recording.

We're just going to hit some high points today, with a couple of other performances tacked on, and I thought we'd kick off with a perennial favorite excerpt of mine, the Act I farewell trio, as the ladies think their fiancés are going off to war, in a scheme engineered by their cynical old friend Don Alfonso.

Act I, Trio, Fiordiligi-Dorabella-Don Alfonso,
"Soave sia il vento"

Gentle be the breeze,
Calm be the waves,
And every element
Smile in favour
On their wish.

Margaret Price (s), Fiordiligi; Yvonne Minton (ms), Dorabella; Hans Sotin (bs), Don Alfonso; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. EMI, recorded Jan. 25-Feb. 18, 1971

Irmgard Seefried (s), Fiordiligi; Nan Merriman (ms), Dorabella; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (b), Don Alfonso; Berlin Philharmonic, Eugen Jochum, cond. DG, recorded December 1962

[in English] Elizabeth Harwood (s), Fiordiligi; Janet Baker (ms), Dorabella; John Shirley-Quirk (bs-b), Don Alfonso; Scottish National Opera Orchestra, Alexander Gibson, cond. Live performance, May 1969


TO CONTINUE WITH OUR LISTEN-
THROUGH OF THE KLEMPERER COSÌ --