After a Guinness Record 60 Seasons with One Orchestra
And More Than 10,200 Performances …
FOR STANLEY DRUCKER
THE MUSIC NEVER STOPS.
 
By Hal Drucker

It was the finale to end all finales, his ultimate solo performance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on June 9, 2009.  As my wife and I witnessed it from our customary Avery Fisher Hall seats F 101 and F 102, the words he spoke to me several years earlier resonated with the fluency of his legatos, pizzicatos and glissandos.
 
“I’m proudest of always giving never less than 110%.”

Principal Clarinetist Stanley Drucker performed Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto with passion and unbridled joy under the baton of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra’s outgoing music director Loren Maazel, a man who is 13 months Drucker’s junior. Copland’s piece was commissioned by Benny Goodman one year before Drucker joined the orchestra at age 19. He played it with typical verve on his beloved Buffet Crampon clarinet and the audience showered its love on him at the conclusion with what seemed like 12 minutes of curtains calls. With its reliance on the proper pursing of the lips over an unforgiving reed, the elasticity of the jaw and the subtlest nuances of human breath to negotiate more than three octaves to obtain its pristine timbre, his accomplishment at age 80 was all the more astonishing.

At the onset of the concert, a moving eight-minute large-screen tribute to Stanley Drucker from the musicians who affected his life (and vice versa) was shown.

Click here: YouTube - A Tribute to Stanley Drucker
Or copy & paste: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZh1k-OaWyg

Man and Boy, Stanley Drucker played the clarinet with The New York Philharmonic without let-up for 61 years. Walter Botti, was a double bass player for the Philharmonic for 50 years. There is nothing in the canon of classical music to suggest that any player has come close to the outrageously youthful Drucker’s achievement. To put it in perspective, the cellist Martin Ormandy, who performed up to the age of 95 with New York’s Mostly Mozart Orchestra, was with the Philharmonic for a mere 36 years. Drucker’s colleague Joseph Robinson, principal oboist for the New York Philharmonic, upon announcing his retirement, was praised in the New York Times five years ago for his “28 years of longevity.”  Jon Deak, the Philharmonic’s distinguished double bassist joined Drucker in retirement after 40 years with the orchestra. "He doesn't play any note straight," Deak says. "There is always a distinctive tone quality to what he produces. There's a certain edge and eagerness to his playing that just makes Stanley, Stanley."

Now here’s something worthy of monitoring: Orin O’Brien joined the orchestra as a double bassist in 1966, the first woman to become a full-time member. To equal Drucker’s record, she would have to retire at age 90. Today –   Orin O’Brien at 73 can look around at a sea of women, who today comprise more than half the orchestra.

I first interviewed Stanley between  rehearsals at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center five years ago. To my knowledge, we are not related, though my paternal grandparents emigrated from a region proximate to the province of Galicea where his parents came from. Photo: Hal Drucker

Stanley Drucker’s first formal photo with the New York Philharmonic at age 19, circa 1948. Courtesy NY Philharmonic Archives.

“My only exercise takes place about 10:20 p.m. most evenings, when I race from the Avery Fisher Hall stage after our bows. I quickly removed my formal clothes for civvies, dash down to the subway, position myself on the platform to the door that opens near the stairs at the Penn Station stop, descend the stairs two steps at a time and speed to the proper track for the 10:34 p.m. to Massapequa, Long Island. In my head, I’d be accompanied by an allegro cadenza. Some day I might score it for a 14-minute sonata: Drucker’s Mad, Mad Journey in A-Flat Minor.”

The journey to a home on the water on the South Shore of Long Island, complete with 30-foot power boat and wife Naomi, really began in earnest when he was a Brooklyn boy in corduroy knickers.

“Though my mother Rose and father Joseph each came from the same region in Europe and arrived here in 1909 – they met in the U. S.  Dad was a custom tailor, Mom a housewife. Within one year he brought over both parents and nine brothers and sisters.  For my 10th birthday, my parents presented me with a clarinet made of a cheap vintage plastic, Bakelite and obtained a teacher for my sister Sylvia, then 16, and me, who came to our apartment.” That very same year, in 1939, a precocious nine-year-old in short pants, Lorin Maazel, led the New York World’s Fair Orchestra in Flushing Meadow Park, Queens.

“At first I didn’t like to practice, much preferring to play stickball with a spaldeen  (I was a two-sewer hitter).  Our teacher, Arthur Small, was pretty good. He played the sax and clarinet in a dance band. After he left to go on the road, a local mom and pop music store recommended a teacher by the name of Leon Russianoff (who reminds me in looks and temperament  of Woody Allen). He had been a student of Simeon Bellison, who was First Clarinet of the New York Philharmonic, from 1920 to 1948, when I joined the orchestra as Assistant First Clarinet.  Since Bellison was born in 1881, the same year Bela Bartok was born, my linkage to the instrument goes back to the days when Brahms and Tchaikovsky held sway.

“Russianoff was a very interesting man, psychologically well-suited to handling students, of which there were many. Both my wife Naomi and Arlene Alda (nee Weiss) wife of Alan (two of our best friends) studied with him. After the eighth grade, I auditioned and was accepted at 14 to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. One of my classmates was Seymour Cohen, who later became Cy Coleman, composer of Sweet Charity.  In the summer, I was a movie usher in the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, and also played klezmer in Borscht Belt bands in the Catskills, for three bucks a week and all I could eat.

“While playing in the Fiorello H. LaGuardia Music and Art orchestra, I also performed with the National Orchestral Association, founded and conducted by Leon Barzin, a former Philharmonic viola principal. The NOA was a training ground for musicians interested in an orchestral career, and performed in Carnegie Hall. Like almost everyone at Music and Art, we hoped to some day attend the prestigious Juilliard School. But I was in a Catch-22 situation; for Juilliard, you had to have a high school diploma, and I was 2 ½ years away from getting one.

“So while still a freshman at Music and Art, I auditioned for and was accepted by the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. I stayed with a Philadelphia family, who made sure I had at least one meal a day.

“Just as I was beginning to enjoy cheese steaks almost as much as Nathan’s hot dogs, an extraordinary thing happened. The conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony, Fabian Sevitsky (the story is that his uncle Serge Koussevitzky and a mentor of Leonard Bernstein, paid him to drop the first syllable) came to Curtis to audition for players. I expected to stay at Curtis for a long time, but as a result of the glamorous-sounding opportunity of becoming Principal Clarinet at 16, I went to the director of the school, the famed violinist Efrem Zimbalist, Sr. and asked him what I should do. He said, ‘Take the post, you can always come back.’ Despite the fact my father said to me, ‘Stanley, you can’t make a living at this mishegas,’ I took the post and never came back, not even for a high school diploma.  We played in the Murat Theater, a former Masonic temple in Indy.  The orchestra was and still is very fine; we made recordings for RCA Victor and did major tours by train.  

“My next post was with the Adolf Busch Chamber Players – when I was 17 – an esteemed touring ensemble. Busch’s son-in-law was the pianist Rudolf Serkin, and his grandson. piano virtuoso Peter Serkin. The next year, at 18, I became Principal Clarinetist for the Buffalo Philharmonic under the eminent William Steinberg.  And then, on to the New York Philharmonic as Assistant First Clarinet.   I sat on that stage, that memorable October day in Carnegie Hall in 1948, and I thought I knew it all, but I trembled looking around me in awe at the hot players who comprised that orchestra, men who sat in the same chairs when Arturo Toscanini led the orchestra between 1928-1936. Notice that I said ‘men.’ Not until Orin O’Brien joined the orchestra in 1966, did a woman become a full-time member.”

In his first year, Drucker earned $125 to $135 a week for a 28 week season.  When my wife and I became subscribers to the Philharmonic concerts in 1958, Stanley Drucker was celebrating his 10th year with the orchestra, Dimitri Mitropoulos was Music Director and the venue was the acoustically superlative Carnegie Hall. “I loved Mitropoulos,” Drucker confided, “he was a very rare man, a saintly man who lived the simple life. He helped young people with their music lessons and gave away instruments at his expense.  Every conductor under whom I served had his plusses. Lenny was the champion of all players.” [Lenny of course was Leonard Bernstein, under whom Drucker became Principal Clarinet in 1960].

Drucker and Maazel during the Copland Concerto finale. Photo: Chris Lee.

Drucker’s final Music Director Lorin Maazel, got high marks from New York Times music critics for his intellectual and technical prowess but negatives for humanity and soul. Drucker had this to say about Maazel. “He’s very Toscanini-like, our bridge to the great names of the past. Everything is in his head. A true genius and the last man standing from the Toscanini/Bruno Walter era.”

Drucker maintained an active solo career, appearing with ensembles throughout the world, performing such notable works for his instrument by Mozart (“his Concerto in A Major, is the Mt. Everest of clarinet pieces”), Brahms, Schumann, Debussy, Carl Nielsen, and thanks to Benny Goodman, who commissioned them, clarinet pieces by Aaron Copland, Darius Milhaud, Paul Hindemith and Bela Bartok.

“I knew Goodman well, and admired his deftness in both jazz and classical music. But Artie Shaw was wonderfully unique. He had a different voice, he had soul. He left a lasting impression. As for playing jazz, I’m not qualified for that. I do pseudo-jazz. I did a jazzy thing in which the Philharmonic recorded an all-Gershwin CD, which includes that great introductory solo for clarinet in his Rhapsody in Blue, which I once performed in concert with Oscar Levant at the piano and for Woody Allen’s movie, Manhattan. 

“I’ve been lucky in my career. I had the honor of performing two clarinet works commissioned by the Philharmonic for me:  John Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto for its world premiere performance on December 9, 1977, which he dedicated ‘For Lennie and Stanley,’ and William Bolcom’s Clarinet Concerto in a world premiere performance for the 150th anniversary of the Philharmonic on January 4, 1992, conducted by Leonard Slatkin.  Drucker was twice nominated for Grammy Awards in the category of Best Instrumental Soloist with Orchestra for a recording of the Corigliano, under Zubin Mehta, in 1981 and the Copland Concerto under Bernstein in 1991.

Naomi Drucker is founder and Co-Director of the American Chamber Ensemble, celebrating its 44th anniversary, and was Principal Clarinet with the North Carolina Symphony for two seasons. She is on the faculty of her alma mater, Hofstra University.  She and Stanley Drucker recorded double concerti for clarinet by Franz Krommer and Meyer Kupferman.   Photo from S. & N. Drucker archives.

The Druckers have two grown children,  Rosanne a country singer, who often sings with her brother Leon, known professionally as Lee Rocker, who was a member of the Rockabilly trio Stray Cats, and who tours extensively today with his own band. “He’s a really fine musician, songwriter and singer and is a great bass player. He’s got the style for the double bass in the early roots of rock and roll. When we get to his concerts, they put a smile on your face.” Leon, his wife and children, Justin, 19, and Sadie, 17, have a home in California. Stanley has managed to squeeze in solo engagements and master classes on the Coast to see his grandkids several times a year.

Any long range plan to mothball your instrument and hang it all up?, I asked.
 
“Unless the cheers turn to jeers, I’ll do it until I drop.”

Hal Drucker is a member of The Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle and the co-author of the book:  "From the Desk Of:  Work Styles of 43 Famous Americans.”