[Dixielandjazz] The 60 year Gig Ends

[Stephen G Barbone]

Now here's a twist. The superb classical clarinetist Stanley Drucker,  
was inspired to be a clarinetist after hearing Benny Goodman. He is at  
Avery Fisher Hall tomorrow and Tuesday to perform Aaron Copeland's  
Concerto for Clarinet and you can bet the farm that it will be superb.  
The only other man to perform this concerto with the NY Philharmonic  
was Benny Goodman and he could never come close to the classical  
mastery of Stanley Drucker.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone
www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband

June 5, 2009 - NY TIMES =- By Daniel J. Wakin
Ending a 60-Year Gig at the N.Y. Philharmonic

A SCHEDULING mishap left the New York Philharmonic in a pickle last  
month. With the players onstage and audience members shifting in their  
seats, there was no one in the first clarinet chair for Shostakovich’s  
Violin Concerto No. 1.

Stanley Drucker, the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, was not  
scheduled to play. When word of the problem reached him, he rushed  
from the players’ lounge, took his place and quickly flipped through  
the technically demanding part as the conductor, David Zinman, and the  
soloist,Christian Tetzlaff, walked onstage.

Though he hadn’t performed the work since the 1950s, Mr. Drucker  
nailed it, colleagues later recounted, throwing out Shostakovich’s  
skittering, manic lines with aplomb. “I think I did a pretty good  
job,” Mr. Drucker said. “I guess it’ll go into the folklore of  
‘jumping in.’ ”

Mr. Drucker, 80, will soon enter something bigger than folklore.  
Legend maybe? History? He is retiring from the Philharmonic after 60  
years, the longest tenure of any player in the orchestra’s existence.  
His departure foreshadows another changing of the guard: the music  
director, Lorin Maazel, also ends his tenure this season.

On Saturday and Tuesday, Mr. Drucker is to give his final solo  
performances with the orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall, playing Aaron  
Copland’s Concerto. He is also on tap for performances at the New  
Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Friday and at Tilles Center  
in Brookville, N.Y., on June 19.

The Copland is one of Mr. Drucker’s benchmark works, a jazzy and  
lighthearted piece that fits his loose, jaunty style of playing and  
sunny personality. He has made it his own, performing it 60 times with  
the Philharmonic as of Friday. Only one other clarinetist has ever  
played the concerto with the orchestra: the man who commissioned it  
(and who inspired Mr. Drucker’s parents to buy their 10-year-old  
Stanley a clarinet),Benny Goodman.

At a rehearsal on Wednesday, orchestra members gave their colleague  
several rounds of foot-tapping applause. He played with abandon,  
swaying from side to side, tilting his clarinet upward, bouncing his  
eyebrows in time with the notes. Other players smiled with pleasure.

The departure of someone like Mr. Drucker is not only a sea change for  
the orchestra and its collective memory but also an occasion to use  
phrases like “end of an era.” He was part of a generation of  
remarkable woodwind principal players who came to their jobs in the  
decades after World War II, when American orchestras became the  
skilled, hearty musical machines that were the prides of their cities.

He has outlasted, and outlived, almost all of them.

“I’m the last of the Mohicans,” he said in an interview at his home in  
Massapequa, N.Y., where his beloved 30-foot cabin cruiser, the Noni,  
is tied up by the deck. It is waiting to take Mr. Drucker and his  
wife, Naomi, a professional clarinetist with her own career, on their  
annual summer cruise up the Atlantic Coast. (Noni is Mrs. Drucker’s  
childhood nickname.)

“It’s just the way life works,” he said. “You have your time, your  
era. Mine has been a very long time and era. I’ve been very lucky.”

Mr. Drucker said his musical faculties were undiminished, but 80 was a  
good moment to bid farewell. “I always wanted to retire with  
everything intact,” he added.

In his time he has seen the orchestra turn from a smoke-filled, poker- 
playing boys’ club to an assembly half populated by women; progress  
from a part-time job to a year-round occupation; move from Carnegie  
Hall to Lincoln Center. He lived through its heyday as a recording  
machine and watched its output dry up to nothing but a dribble of  
online issues.

He has played for most of the great conductors of his time: George  
Szell (“not a pleasant guy”), Dimitri Mitropoulos (“a saint”), Leopold  
Stokowski(“called everybody ‘You, sir’ ”), Leonard Bernstein  
(“Whatever he touched seemed to work”).

The Philharmonic has yet to find a successor. Auditions this season  
were inconclusive. The orchestra will hold another search next season.

Mr. Drucker’s retirement has unleashed an orgy of numbers from the  
Philharmonic: 10 music directors during his tenure, 60 countries  
visited on tour, 191 solo appearances and 10,200 concerts with the  
orchestra — two-thirds of the total since it was founded in 1842.

The numbers are on display at an exhibition in a corridor at Avery  
Fisher Hall that traces his career and provides clips of interviews  
and performances. It was organized by Amy Shapiro, a former student  
who is writing a doctoral dissertation about the Philharmonic through  
his experiences. At a private preview last week, a subdued Mr. Drucker  
seemed moved. “It’s overwhelming,” he said softly.

Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that Mr. Drucker is only the third  
principal clarinetist of the Philharmonic in almost 90 years. Imagine  
three chief justices of the United States since 1920, or three popes,  
or three Yankees managers.

Mr. Drucker has left his imprint on millions of listeners, night after  
night. It was his version of the solos in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony,  
or in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, or in Rimsky-Korsakov’s  
“Scheherazade,” or in countless other pieces that audiences heard  
night after night. Mr. Drucker’s clarinet also soared in the opening  
of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” heard in Woody Allen’s movie  
“Manhattan.”

Mr. Drucker, a briskly cheerful man given to quips and fast walking,  
is not much for deep introspection, at least publicly. He emanates  
ease, in his playing and manner.

“He comes in every day like a 17-year-old, and he’s playing something  
for the first time,” said Carl Schiebler, the orchestra’s longtime  
personnel manager. “It’s a great gift, and also for the people around  
him, to see the enthusiasm.”

Mr. Drucker plans to keep performing. In August he will make two  
appearances with the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society in  
Massachusetts, during a stop on his cruise. He will teach a master  
class in October at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

The secret to playing all these years, Mr. Drucker said, was keeping  
things fresh.

“You have to be driven,” he said. “You want it to have meaning. You  
just don’t rest on your laurels. You try to be new and edge-of-chair.”  
That involves reaching into the “memory bank” of past performances and  
always trying to improve.

Despite Mr. Drucker’s seemingly charmed career, he views himself as  
having had to swim against the current. “I came from a humble  
background,” he said. “I didn’t have a famous teacher. I didn’t have  
what I would say was a well-rounded educational background.”

His parents were Ukrainian immigrants. Mr. Drucker grew up in Brooklyn  
and studied for five years with Leon Russianoff, who later became a  
noted pedagogue. At 15, he was admitted to the Curtis Institute of  
Music in Philadelphia, and by the end of his first year, he had his  
first job, with the Indianapolis Symphony. After two more quick  
orchestra stops, Mr. Drucker landed at the New York Philharmonic as  
assistant principal and E flat clarinetist.

He was 19.

He essentially learned on the job. “It was a master class every day,”  
he said. By 1960, he was principal clarinetist, appointed by Bernstein.

Mr. Drucker performed his first solo with the orchestra in 1961 under  
Bernstein and was the last soloist to play under him. “Lenny was the  
most unique of them all,” Mr. Drucker said. “Everything became an  
event, the tours, the type of pieces that he promoted, the countless  
recordings.”

Bernstein declined to write a concerto for Mr. Drucker, citing time  
constraints, but recommended the composer John Corigliano and insisted  
on conducting the premiere of Mr. Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto. A  
recording with the conductor Zubin Mehta won Mr. Drucker a  
Grammynomination in 1982. Another came for the Copland Concerto with  
Bernstein in 1992. In 1998 he was Musical America’s instrumentalist of  
the year.

The Druckers live in a red-brick and brown-shingle home, surrounded by  
a lush garden, in a cul-de-sac. They share a 12-by-12-foot studio, one  
of four bedrooms. A slab of glass sits on a nondescript black desk,  
used to work on reeds. Boxes of them fill a wicker basket.

In a drawer a cardboard box contains a jumble of barrels — the barrel  
being the short section of the clarinet below the mouthpiece — and  
many mouthpieces. Mr. Drucker is always looking for a backup, he said,  
but nothing will improve on the mouthpiece he bought from Russianoff  
in 1948 for $6. He still plays it.

“It shows you I can stick to things,” he said. “It must have been a  
good deal.”

Pictures cover every inch of the studio’s walls, a visual biography  
and a monument to Mr. Drucker’s longevity and prominence: Mr. Drucker  
with Paul Hindemith (inscribed “Don’t forget this old composer”),  
Copland, Goodman, Morton Gould, Pablo Casals, Bernstein, Mr. Mehta,  
Kurt Masur.

There is Mr. Drucker on tour in front of the Teatro Alla Scala, next  
to the Berlin Wall, in North Korea last year.

Record company ad copy calls him: “Not just the first clarinet of the  
first orchestra. Very possibly the first clarinetist of the world.”  
Also on the wall is an enlarged Rolling Stone cover featuring the  
Stray Cats, which includes his son, the bassist who goes by the name  
Lee Rocker. The Druckers’ daughter, Rosanne Drucker, is a country  
music singer and songwriter.

A portrait of Leon Russianoff, after whom the Druckers named their  
son, is naturally there. It is inscribed, “To the greatest of them all.”

FROM THE DRUCKER VAULTS

Stanley Drucker’s clarinet can be heard in countless New York  
Philharmonic recordings, but he also made many solo and chamber music  
discs. Two — containing the Corigliano and Copland concertos — were  
nominated for Grammys. Here is a sampling.

STANLEY DRUCKER PLAYS BRAHMS, Elysium Records (2001, two discs,  
$38.98). SCHUMANN: THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR WINDS AND PIANO, Alan  
Stepansky, cellist; Gerald Appleman, cellist; Mr. Drucker,  
clarinetist; Elysium (1996, $72.84, import).

MOZART: THE ELYSIUM STRING QUARTET & FRIENDS, with Mr. Drucker,  
clarinetist; Allen Spanjer and L. William Kuyper, horn players; Joseph  
Robinson, oboist; Elysium (1999, $18.98).COPLAND: EL SALÓN MÉXICO/ 
CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND STRING ORCHESTRA/MUSIC FOR THE THEATER/ 
CONNOTATIONS FOR ORCHESTRAS, Mr. Drucker and the New York  
Philharmonic, conducted byLeonard Bernstein; Deutsche Grammophon  
(1991, $16.98).

JOHN CORIGLIANO, CONCERTO FOR CLARINET AND ORCHESTRA/SAMUEL BARBER,  
THIRD ESSAY FOR ORCHESTRA, Mr. Drucker and the New York Philharmonic  
conducted by Zubin Mehta; New World Records (1992, $17.99). CONTRASTS  
FOR VIOLIN, CLARINET AND PIANO, byBela Bartok, with Robert Mann,  
violinist; Mr. Drucker, clarinetist; and Leonid Hambro, pianist;  
Bartok Records ($15, available frombartokrecords.com).