After 60 years at center stage, clarinetist Stanley Drucker is retiring from NY Philharmonic

NY Phil clarinetist Drucker retires after 60 years

NEW YORK — Like any great musician, Stanley Drucker has his timing down.

With youthful looks and the energy of a person half his 80 years, the New York Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist still makes a precision commute — by train, by subway, and by his own spry steps — from his home in Massapequa to Lincoln Center. He times it so that he “can make the trains with a minute to spare.”

That precision commute is coming to an end.

After 60 years sitting at center stage, the Philharmonic’s oldest member — once its youngest member — is about to retire.

Drucker, who was hired in 1948 at 19, has played under nine Philharmonic music directors. He has performed in some 10,200 Philharmonic concerts — about 70 percent of the performances presented by the 167-year-old orchestra, the nation’s oldest. He has played in front of more than 40 million people, according to orchestra estimates.

“He’s one of the giants of American orchestral musical tradition,” Zubin Mehta, one of his former Philharmonic music directors, said in a telephone interview from Florence, Italy. “I don’t think his feat or his record will be equaled for a long time. … I just conducted him a few months ago, and his enthusiasm for every bar of music he plays has not left him after all these years. Amazing, amazing! … He’s a real Gibraltar.”

Weeks before his final concert, Drucker will be the featured soloist in Copland’s Clarinet Concerto at Avery Fisher Hall on Thursday, Saturday and June 9. Drucker has performed it 64 times with the orchestra and recorded it twice with his fellow musicians, receiving a Grammy nomination for one recording.

“To me, it’s an old friend, but I’m always looking for something fresh,” Drucker said during an interview before a recent rehearsal.

It’s the same philosophy he applies to the symphonic repertoire he has played even more frequently. How does he find newness in works he has played countless times?

“You get inspired by something,” he said. “You change one phrase. You change slightly, a forward motion, or see the phrase in a new way. That’s what you try to do because live performance is for the moment.”

Drucker’s musical moment began in Brooklyn. To get him off the stickball lot, his parents — a tailor and housewife who immigrated from Ukraine — made an $18 investment for a clarinet for a present for his 10th birthday. (Good ones now cost around $3,000.)

“It was probably to make me do better than they did,” he recalled. “It was a way of getting me off the lot, where I would be just playing ball or something. They got me to practice, and after about a year and a half it was no turning back. I just stayed with it.”

His teacher would give him an etude book a week. In just five years — when he was 15 — he won an audition for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. The next year, however, he dropped out after winning a tryout with the Indianapolis Symphony.

At 18, he won another audition — with the Buffalo Philharmonic under William Steinberg. A year later, he got his big break across the state.

“So I went to the New York Philharmonic at 19 thinking I knew everything. But I found out I didn’t know anything,” Drucker said. “I guess I was focused and dedicated and maybe talented. I learned by listening to the great performers, the great artists, that were in the New York Philharmonic.”

The conductor at the time was the legendary Bruno Walter, a disciple of Gustav Mahler. Other batons he played under during his first season were wielded by Dimitri Mitropoulos, Leopold Stokowski, Leonard Bernstein and Charles Munch.

Playing under Walter, he said, was “like being in a hallowed place.”

“Every rehearsal became a master class for me, listening to these people play, and experiencing these great conductors in my first season.”

It took him 12 seasons to rise to section leader. He was appointed by Bernstein, who was in his second season as music director.

“The man was bigger than life,” Drucker said. “There will never be another one like him. He could get players to play better than they could. He had two ingredients that cannot be taught — joy and passion. Those are vital to a performer.”

Drucker’s final Philharmonic concert is on July 31 in Vail, Colo.

“The last performance with the Philharmonic is going to be the same as my first,” he insisted.

But afterward, he won’t hang up the horn.

“A player never really stops,” he said.

On the Net:

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