Stanley Drucker, who was generally known as the dean of American orchestral clarinets throughout a 60-year profession with the New York Philharmonic, placing his mark on numerous performances and recordings beneath a legion of celebrated conductors, died on Monday in Vista, Calif., outdoors San Diego. He was 93.
His demise, at the residence of his daughter, Rosanne Drucker, was confirmed by his son, Lee.
Mr. Drucker, who retired in 2009, was solely the fourth principal clarinetist of the Philharmonic since 1920 when he took up the submit. Few wind gamers at any of the nice American orchestras served as lengthy.
He performed for the Philharmonic music administrators Leonard (*93*), Pierre Boulez, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur and Lorin Maazel, presenting a mode and sound that typified the Philharmonic’s character — soloistic, technically and sonically good, flamboyant and on the verge of brash.
Mr. Drucker mixed shapely phrasing with impeccable fingerwork. With his iron-gray hair and a barely crooked entrance tooth, he was identified for his youthful look and vitality properly into his 70s. His nickname in the orchestra was “Stanley Steamer,” a mirrored image of his swift marches offstage to make the commute to his residence on Long Island, in Massapequa. “That’s my exercise,” he typically mentioned, “running for the train.”
Such a protracted tenure naturally meant that he encountered the identical items time and again, and he greeted them like “old friends,” he mentioned. The completely different views that varied conductors would convey to the music, he added, stored issues recent.
“You absorb the personality and talent of whoever’s up on the podium,” he mentioned.
Just as a lot, these maestri would defer to Mr. Drucker’s interpretations of clarinet solos. Such was his affect that when a clarinet-playing New York Times reporter put in a request to perform with the orchestra for an article in 2004, the closing say rested not with the music director, Mr. Maazel, not the orchestra president, Zarin Mehta, not even the highly effective personnel supervisor, Carl Schiebler, however with Mr. Drucker.
Mr. Drucker’s longevity with the Philharmonic gave rise to spectacular statistics: 10,200 concert events with the orchestra, together with 191 solo appearances, and performances of practically each main clarinet concerto and soloist on greater than a dozen recordings. He additionally recorded most of the normal clarinet chamber music works.
He was nominated twice for a Grammy — for recordings of the Aaron Copland Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano, with Leonard (*93*) conducting, and of John Corigliano’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, with Zubin Mehta conducting. The Philharmonic commissioned the Corigliano for Mr. Drucker.
The publication Musical America named him instrumentalist of the yr in 1998, and he was one of the few dwelling orchestral musicians with an entry in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
A measure for any clarinetist is the nice Mozart concerto, one of the composer’s final works. Of a 2001 efficiency, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Drucker gave a “lively, thoughtfully shaped reading” of the opening motion and “tapped all the aching beauty in the Andante.”
“But it was in the finale that he really let loose,” Mr. Kozinn added, “both with phrasing turns that pushed against the constraints of the line and by conveying a sense of heightened dialogue between his instrument and the rest of the orchestra.”
Mr. Drucker conceived of an orchestral wind part as one organism.
“You give and take; you don’t only take,” he mentioned in a 2004 interview with The Times. “It’s a chamber music situation. You play to enhance.” He urged orchestral gamers to develop into deeply conversant in a complete work and specific “what you have inside, what your sensitivity is.”
Stanley Drucker was born on Feb. 4, 1929, in Brooklyn to immigrants from Galicia, which was half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire once they had left it 20 years earlier. He grew up in the Brownsville and Park Slope neighborhoods. His father, Joseph, had a customized tailor store. His mom, Rose (Oberlander) Drucker, was a homemaker.
Like so many clarinetists of the period, Mr. Drucker was impressed by Benny Goodman. His mother and father, seized by the Goodman craze of the time, purchased him a clarinet for his tenth birthday. “They figured it was better than being a tailor,” Mr. Drucker mentioned.
His foremost instructor was Leon Russianoff, a number one clarinet pedagogue of the latter half of the twentieth century, after whom Mr. Drucker would identify his son. Mr. Drucker attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
Astonishingly, he entered the Indianapolis Symphony at age 16. “The object was to play, and get out into the real world,” he mentioned. “I thought I knew everything, but found out quickly I didn’t.” During the summers he would return to New York for classes with Russianoff.
Mr. Drucker spent a yr touring with the Adolf Busch Chamber Players, a conductor-less ensemble led by Mr. Busch, a violinist, after which joined the Buffalo Philharmonic. By 19 he had joined the New York Philharmonic as assistant principal, after Mr. Busch instructed that the Philharmonic invite him to audition. His getting the submit, in 1948, was entrance web page news in The Brooklyn Eagle. “My parents thought I was Joe Louis,” he mentioned.
Despite his youth, Mr. Drucker caught up rapidly, studying on the job. “It was a master class every day,” he mentioned.
(*93*), the Philharmonic’s music director, appointed him to the principal clarinet place in 1960.
In 1998, the Philharmonic commemorated Mr. Drucker’s fiftieth anniversary throughout the closing subscription program of the season by that includes him enjoying the Copland concerto. At the time, he identified that he was not the oldest participant there.
“I’ve been there the longest, because I started so young,” he told The Times. “But time compresses, you know? Fifty years doesn’t really seem so long.”
Mr. Drucker married Naomi Lewis, a clarinetist who has had a fruitful profession in her personal proper, in 1956. Their son, Leon, who goes by Lee, is a bassist with the rockabilly band Stray Cats, performing beneath the identify Lee Rocker. Their daughter, Rosanne, is an alt-country singer-songwriter.
In addition to his spouse and kids, Ms. Drucker is survived by two grandchildren. He lived for many of his grownup life in Massapequa.
Along with the clarinet, Mr. Drucker and his spouse had a ardour for his or her 30-foot-long fly bridge cabin cruiser, which they christened the Noni, for Ms. Drucker’s childhood nickname. They would take it for a monthlong cruise each summer time.
Mr. Drucker edited quite a few volumes of research, solo works and orchestral excerpts for clarinet for the International Music Co. He taught at the Juilliard School from 1968-98.
But he was not given to high-flown pronouncements about artistry or musicianship.
“You learn all of this stuff,” he as soon as mentioned. “And after a point, somebody has to tell you, ‘Forget it all, just go out and play.’”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.