Chain of associations: Retracing how 'Excerpt I' came into my head + the odd path to 'Excerpt II' + a stab at explaining how it mattered

I KNOW I'LL REGRET IT, BUT I WANT TO TRY TALKING
ABOUT WHAT I THINK OF AS MUSICAL "AUTHENTICITY"
(Which has nothing to do with the kind usually talked about)

What is this distinguished-looking fellow up to? (FWIW,
note that whatever it is, he's doing it without a baton.)

EXCERPT  I

[2:47] New Philharmonia Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca 'Phase 4', recorded in Kingsway Hall, London, September 1965

EXCERPT  II

[Don't overboost the volume! Note that Excerpt II starts 'p' (soft); even the crescendo is only to 'poco più f ' (a little louder).]

[4:49] Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Leopold Stokowski, cond. Decca 'Phase 4', recorded in the Grand Théâtre, Geneva, Sept. 15-16, 1968

NOTE: Excerpt II is so startling in both conception and scoring, I've copied more of the score for when we hear it again. -- Ed.

A NOTE ON THE WORK THAT 'EXCERPT II' COMES FROM

Many (most?) people, when they think of it, think of the great love theme --


[2:48] Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. DG, recorded in the Jesus-Christus-Kirche, Oct. 12-13, 1966

But that's not where we're heading. This theme is kind of foolproof, can't-miss. It's hard to imagine any conductor misfiring with it. -- Ed.

by Ken

Sometimes it's intriguing to try to retrace a train of thought, back to its point of origin, to maybe see how it was hatched, and then how it morphed through its wanderings. As it happens, in this case -- the case of the specific part of the "odd path" I referenced above, from Excerpt I to Excerpt II -- the pathway, if not the actual thought collision, is easy to identify: On a Stoky "compilation" CD that Decca put out, they're the first and last of the 17 tracks.


HOW EXACTLY DID THOSE TRACKS AT OPPOSITE
ENDS OF A 17-TRACK CD CRASH INTO EACH OTHER?

Just four works to go in our journey through clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's "Top 10 [really 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos"

THIS TIME: Coming up we have Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Rachmaninoff, and Kodály

It seems to me I've heard that song before.
It's from an old familiar score.
I know it well, that melody . . . .

[Yes, "that song" is the opening Andante ma non troppo of the Sibelius First Symphony, more or less as it passed that Sunday afternoon in March 1950 from the stage of Carnegie Hall across the country. We indeed heard the New York Philharmonic, but not "under the direction of Victor de Sabata," interesting as that might be to hear. (Recordings of that broadcast do exist!)]

by Ken

I think by now we all know who the conductor and clarinetist on our clip are. Once again we hear once Leonard Bernstein conducting the NY Phil, with the clarinetting provided by Stanley Drucker, the orchestra's principal clarinet, 1960-2009 -- from the orchestra's March 1967 recording of the symphony.I think by now we all know that that clip of the opening of the Sibelius First Symphony is from the March 1967 New York Philharnonic recording conducted by Leonard Bernstein, with the clarinetting provided by Stanley Drucker (1929-2022), the orchestra's principal clarinet, 1960-2009.

What caught my eye on that concert program, though, as I perused the Philharmonic's nifty Digital Archive, was the date of that concert. Stanley D., we recall, joined the orchestra as assistant principal in 1948 (at age 19). If, as seems likely, he was playing the 2nd clarinet part, this would have been his first NY Phil performance of Sibelius 1.

I bring it up because we're going to run into Sibelius 1 as we make our final push -- clear down to No. 1 and beyond -- through Charlotte (NC) Symphony clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's "Top 10 [really 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos," posted on the orchestra's Sound of Charlotte Blog in November 2020, played mostly by Stanley D. (So far, down through No. 4, we've heard him play all seven -- today is where the "mostly" kicks in.)

THE LIST SO FAR

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

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

We now hear our "elite" violin concertos in their entirety

As we edge forward with our Mendelssohn "sidebar" -- as I just explained -- it's time to hear these concertos in full.

[TUESDAY UPDATE: You might watch for updates to this post, like the one I just added for the Brahms Concerto.]

Last week ("Rondomania: A quick hit at violin-concerto rondo finales looking back from Mendelssohn to Mozart and Beethoven and ahead to Brahms and Sibelius"), pursuing the Mendelssohn "sidebar" that grew out of the Nov. 28 post "One Sunday afternoon in
August 1943 in Carnegie Hall . . .," we listened to the great chain of violin concertos with rondo finales stretching out before and after Mendelssohn. I said at the time that I'd really like to be able to present those concertos in full. Well, here they are!

This all still needs to be integrated with a mostly written first part that continues the Mendelssohnian thread. And probably it should be improved in all sorts of other ways. I wouldn't hold my breath about that part, though. -- Ken

AGAIN, WE REALLY HAVE TO START WITH MOZART

In our original consideration of the place of the rondo finale in the line of the great violin concertos, we started with Mozart --

• not because he invented either the violin concerto or the rondo or even the use of the rondo in violin (and other) concertos, which he didn't, but because he grasped the possibilities of this combination in a way, or ways, that made it stick.

• and not because Mozart's violin concertos, taken on their own, are equivalent in stature to the line of violin concertos they did so much to inspire. The form -- the Classical concerto, that is, not to be confused with the Baroque one -- was still too new to aspire to that stature. (Thank you once again, Herr Beethoven.)

Not that the three "mature" concertos (which followed with scarcely any separation from the not-yet-mature ones) can't still hold their own on a concert platform. But you kind of feel that the audience needs at minimum a somewhat bigger kick, and the performer has to put out a portion more to earn his/her fee. So, with no disrespect to any of these much-loved works, I'm thinking of them maybe more as a collective than as separate entires in our violin-concerto sweepstakes. (If it were piano concertos we were tracking, I'm not sure I would take the same position. But Mozart's piano concertos come from a more developed stage of his creative energies. There are at least half a dozen Mozart piano concertos I'd consider worthy of inclusion in such a survey.

BUT: We're skipping the Mozart Violin Concertos Nos. 1-2

Rondomania: A quick hit at violin-concerto rondo finales looking back from Mendelssohn to Mozart and Beethoven and ahead to Brahms and Sibelius

UPDATED with assorted touches here and there and at the end some promises of some "Mozart Rondo Bonuses" to come -- and maybe some other goodies.

FRIDAY UPDATE: Hey, what about the Dvořák Violin Concerto? Well, especially since we're focused on rondo finales, Dvořák needs to be here -- has anybody used the form better? (Note, by the way, how closely bunched in time the Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák concertos are. Isn't this kind of amazing?)

rondo  n.  Music.  A composition having a principal theme that occurs at least three times in its original key between contrasting subordinate themes.

-- The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, 3rd ed., 1992

by Ken

No, Mozart didn't invent either the rondo (as we know it from the Classical era) or the idea of plunking it into emerging Classical sonata-form forms, let alone the idea of making it the standard way of rounding out the shape of the emerging Classical concerto. In the 1770s, it was just in the air. And if there's one thing that Mozart, growing out of adolescence into young adulthood, was alert to, it was what was in the air music-wise.

We know that he was interested early on in this newfangled kind of concerto that was coming into being. Goodness knows there'd been a ton of concertos in the now-passed Baroque era, but the burgeoning Classical world was developing something significantly different, and the 19-year-old Mozart had a good idea that he could do something with it.


MOZART SURE FIGURED OUT FAST WHAT THE RONDO COULD COULD DO FOR HIM -- AND HE COULD DO FOR THE RONDO

Which is why we're going to start our rondomania quick hit with the binge of concerto-writing Mozart did in 1775. As I mentioned in this week's main post (or, rather, main pre-post: "(Maybe one more little pre-post?) No, these 14 bars aren't The Most Beautiful Music Ever Written; they're what comes right after it"), these audio files were ready to go, and I'm putting them up in raw form so they'll be available for listening. And once the raw form is posted, I can listen to them too, and who knows? Maybe I'll figure out something to say about them.

[NOTE: While I don't usually include dates in composition listings, I've done so here since our vantage point here is the Mendelssohn E minor Violin Concerto and the place of its rondo finale in the line of the landmark violin concertos.]

Gennady Rozhdestvensky (1931-2018)

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: Symphony No. 5 in D:
i. Preludio

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cond. BBC Radio Classics, recorded live in the Royal Festival Hall at the BBC Symphony Orchestra 50th Anniversary Concert of Oct. 22, 1980

by Ken

Goodness, we have so much work to do -- old business, specifically look-back business (hint: look again at just the opening images of last week's YouTube clips of performances of Mason Jones's woodwind-quintet arrangement of Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin suite and note the immediately visible difference you can see), new business, future business, business-in-progress) that it would be hard to know where to start, if we didn't have some already overdue business, dating back to June 16 and the passing of Gennady Rozhdestvensky, at the age of 87.

[For a quick and affectionate once-over of G.R.'s life and career, check out Chris O'Reilly's on the Presto Classical website. -- Ed.]

My first difficulty in memorializing G.R. is that from the time my musical awareness expanded beyond the borders of the continental U.S., he was always there, and I don't recall ever hearing a performance of his that seemed less than fully engaged, and I don't mean just in Russian repertory, of which he was, not surprisingly, a heroic proponent. (We'll come back to this point in a moment, in a number of ways, actually.) But it wouldn't hurt us to hear a sampling of that Russian repertory. Here's the glorious culmination of Part I of The Nutcracker, sounding as properly and organically magisterial as I've ever heard it.

TCHAIKOVSKY: The Nutcracker, Op. 71:
No. 8, Scene in the Pine Forest
No. 9, Scene and Waltz of the Snowflakes [at 3:39]

Bolshoi Theater Children's Chorus (in No. 9), Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, cond. Melodiya, recorded 1960


GEE, MOST OF MY G.R. HOLDINGS ARE ON LP,
AND IT'S SUCH A HASSLE MAKING AUDIO FILES