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

Continuing our countdown of clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's "Top 10 [actually 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos," at No. 6 we come to --

From the Manhattan soundtrack:

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


THIS TIME: Gershwin, Bartók, Beethoven

❻

GERSHWIN: Rhapsody in Blue: beginning

ALLAN ROSENFELD: "Anyone who has ever seen Woody Allen's film Manhattan knows there's no way I could leave this showstopper off the list."

NOW, WE DID THE RHAPSODY OPENING PRETTY WELL -- in January 13's "There's more than one way you can launch a piece with a solo clarinet." But that doesn't mean we can't do it again!


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; Fazil Say, piano; New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec, recorded in Avery Fisher Hall, December 1998

by Ken

As it says up top, we're resuming our countdown of Charlotte (NC) Symphony clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's November 2020 "Top 10 [really 11, with the inclusion of an "Honorable Mention"] Orchestral Clarinet Solos," in our ongoing remembrance of the late Stanley Drucker, and we pick up at No. 6, the consciousness-blowing opening of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which the New York Philharmonic's beyond-legendary Stanley D. can be readily heard playing with no fewer than three NY Phil music directors -- that I know of!

(I had to word that carefully, because as often as Stanley D. and Lenny B. must have performed the Rhapsody together, and as easy as it is to find performances they did together, as far as I know they never actually recorded it together. When Lenny B. did his inevitable DG remake, it was with the LA not NY Phil.)

THE LIST SO FAR

10) Respighi: Pines of Rome, end of "Pines of the Janiculum"
9) Tchaikovsky: Francesca da Rimini
8) Brahms: Symphony No. 3, opening of 2nd movement

-- in "An orchestra principal's most visible job is playing orchestral solos written for his/her instrument. He-e-re's Stanley D.!" [June 25]

7) Puccini: Tosca, Act III, "E lucevan le stelle"

-- in "We move on to No. 7 as we count our way through those 'Top 10 [or 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos' with (mostly) Stanley Drucker" [July 2]

ABOUT ALL THERE REMAINS FOR US TO DO WITH
THE RHAPSODY IS TO HEAR THE WHOLE THING!

We move on to No. 7 as we count our way through those "Top 10 [or 11] Orchestral Clarinet Solos" with (mostly) Stanley Drucker

STANLEY D. GOES TO THE OPERA --
AND HEREUPON HANGS OUR TALE
(with apologies for the crappy sound and crappier end-edit)


OR, TO HEAR IT IN CONTEXT --
(still in crappy sound, but at least without my unavoidably crappy edit)

Great Performers at Lincoln Center, Avery Fisher Hall, live, April 1983
[Note the audience's response when they hear Stanley D. launch "The Solo."]

And the stars were shining
and the earth was perfumed,
the garden gate creaked,
and footsteps grazed the path.
She entered, all fragrance,
she fell into my arms.
O sweet kisses, o languid caresses,
while I, trembling,
unloosed the veils, revealing her beauty!
Gone forever that dream of love --
the hour has fled,
and I die despairing, and I die despairing!
Yet never before have I loved life, loved life so much!

Luciano Pavarotti, tenor; with Stanley Drucker, clarinet; New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta, cond. Encore performance from a Pavarotti-Mehta "Gala Concert," telecast live from Avery Fisher Hall, Apr. 4, 1983 (with post-performance announcements by Martin Bookspan)
[Note: Farther along we're going to hear Luciano P. in good studio sound.]

by Ken

We're continuing our countdown through Charlotte (NC) Symphony Orchestra clarinetist Allan Rosenfeld's list of his "Top 10 Orchestral Clarinet Solos," in the company (mostly) of the New York Philharmonic's 61-season clarinetist, Stanley Drucker (1929-2022) -- first, from age 19, as assistant principal, then for an amazing 49 seasons as principal clarinet.

Last week (in "An orchestra principal's most visible job is playing orchestral solos written for his/her instrument. He-e-re's Stanley D.!") we made it all the way down from No. 10 (the end of "Pines of the Janiculum" from Respighi's Pines of Rome) to No. 8 (the opening of the Andante of the Brahms Third Symphony) -- oh, right, passing through No. 9 (from the "Andante cantabile non troppo" section of Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini).

So here I was thinking that with two good pushes we could get through the whole list, even allowing ample excursion time to look in a larger way at the music represented, which, as I tried to explain, is one effect pondering Stanley D.'s enormous career has had on me. I mean, to have been that immersed in music -- mostly not of his own choosing -- all those decades while maintaining an insistence on bringing to each performance first-performance freshness: How awesome is that?


WOULDN'T YOU KNOW? RIGHT AWAY AT NO. 7 I GOT STUCK

An orchestra principal's most visible job is playing orchestral solos written for his/her instrument. He-e-re's Stanley D.!

STANLEY DRUCKER (1929-2022)
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

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

Rapid hits: Part 3 of 3 --

(1) MEDIC NEEDED FOR VAUGHAN WILLIAMS'S LARK? [Oct. 9]
(2) ONE SOLOIST, MULTIPLE VIEWS OF VW'S LARK [Oct. 10]
(3) A WHOOSH OF MEMORY OF AN EPIC CLARINET GUY [Oct. 11]

[SORRY, I'M BATTLNG A TECHNICAL GLITCH I'VE NEVER ENCOUNTERED. HERE'S THE START OF THE POST -- Ken]

(3) SOME QUICK(ISH) THOUGHTS ON STANLEY DRUCKER (1929-2022)

NY Phil caption: "Stanley Drucker was appointed Assistant
Principal and E-Flat Clarinet by Bruno Walter in 1948."

"The New York Philharmonic deeply mourns the passing of the legendary orchestral clarinetist Stanley Drucker, who joined the Philharmonic in 1948, at age 19, and was appointed Principal Clarinet by Leonard Bernstein in 1960. Over the course of his 60-year tenure he appeared in more than 10,200 concerts in 60 countries, with solo turns including 64 performances of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, and worked during the tenures of nine NY Phil Music Directors. Accolades on his retirement in 2009 included the Guinness World Record for “longest career as a clarinetist” and being named an Honorary Member of the New York Philharmonic. At the time, then Music Director Lorin Maazel said: “He stands alone in the world of clarinetists. His contribution to the orchestra and its fame is immeasurable.” The Philharmonic extends condolences to his wife, Naomi, and to his children and grandchildren." -- from the New York Philharmonic website

As often happens these days, I was late catching up with the news, in this case of the passing, on December 19, of Stanley D., closing in on his 94th birthday, following a career that seems that beggars description -- I find myself reaching for words like "epic." For a while I thought I'd shove aside (temporarily, of course) all the work we're, you know, working on and do a musical remembrance, and we may yet do that. I even devised not one but two openers for such a post. One you've already seen, above. Here's the other:

Stanley D. plays the opening solo of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue -- with Leonard Bernstein of course playing the piano solo as well as conducting the New York Philharmonic -- in the Royal Albert Hall, London, June 3-4, 1976. (Not to worry, we are going to hear the whole performance. Have patience.)

The Gershwin Rhapsody is a piece S.D. was closely associated with, and he played it like nobody else. Commentators have noted the ring of klezmer in parts of the piece, and not many clarinetists have been better positioned to bring that to life. One of the enduring fascinations of the career he built is that, growing up in Brooklyn, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he seems to have had no serious music in his family history or in his surroundings. How then did he happen upon the clarinet? He mentioned in interviews that one thing that inclined him toward it was the sound of klezmer.

UP ABOVE I PROMISED THE WHOLE RHAPSODY.
MAYBE WE SHOULD JUST GO AHEAD AND HEAR IT