This essay is a research document that accompanied my donation of Viktor Polatschek's two Albert/Muller/Oehler system clarinets, an A clarinet and a Bb clarinet, to the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), on Sunday, August 12, 2012, under The Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood. The clarinets have been shown publicly at Symphony Hall in Boston since the fall of 2012 as a highlight of a feature display on the current clarinet section of the BSO. I am indebted to Ms. Bridget Carr, senior archivist of the BSO, and to Ms. Jill Ng, senior major gift officer of the BSO, for their assistance with this project.
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Viktor Polatchek's two Albert/Muller/Oehler system clarinets
Manufactured c. 1909 by F. Koktan and Sons, Vienna |
This is a story about three musicians,
two of whom never met and the third the link between the two, about the richly resonant and textured woodwind
instrument that has defined their lives, and about the love they each have had
for their chosen instrument and its craft. It is also a story about mentorship,
heritage, stewardship and legacy, connecting episodes in the lives of these
three musicians, with the clarinet epicentric as their muse, and with
clarinetistry as the roadmap. It is an interesting story which fills in some
holes and closes some loops along the way, much as pressing the many rings and
closing the many holes of the clarinet help to make its sound so unique,
elegant, tonally even and seamless through the diatonic scales.
There are three interconnected strands
to the circuitous journey of two clarinets, from their manufacture in the early
1900s in the workshop of the pre-eminent woodwind maker in Vienna, Austria, Franz Koktan and Sons, to their purchase by the then principal
clarinetist of the Vienna Philharmonic, Mr. Viktor Polatschek, to his crossing
the Atlantic in 1930 to become principal clarinetist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO), to their being
given to Mr. Eric Simon by the Polatschek family sometime after Polatschek's
death in July, 1948, to their being given by Mr. Simon to me in June, 1994, to
my donating them to the Boston Symphony Orchestra on August 12, 2012.
Viktor Polatschek (1889 - 1948)
Viktor (Victor) Polatschek was born
January 29, 1889 in Chotzen (Choceň in Czech) Bohemia, in what is today the
Czech Republic. He began to study the clarinet in 1903, at age 14, in Vienna,
at the Konservatorium fur Musik (later named the Akademie fur Musik),
the Vienna State Music Academy. He studied with Professor Franz Bartolomey
from 1903 to 1907, graduating with highest honors, and then re-enrolled in 1909
to study with Professor Hermann Gradener. He began teaching at the Vienna Music
Academy in 1921 while playing at the Vienna State Opera. He kept his academic
post until September 30, 1932. His students included Alfred Boskowsky, Viktor
Korda, Hans Kremsberger and Eric Simon.
In 1910, at the age of 21, Polatschek
was appointed as one of the two clarinetists of the Vienna Philharmonic
Orchestra (VPO) and at the Wiener Staatsoper (Vienna State Opera(VSO))
in 1912,. He was named principal clarinet of both VPO and VSO in
1921, and held those positions until 1930.
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Viktor Polatschek in 1930, at age 41,
when he joined the BSO
(courtesy BSO Archives) |
Polatschek was also active in clarinet
pedagogy at the Vienna Music Academy, and composed several works for clarinet
which also have a teaching function. Notable are his etudes based on themes
from famous works, including one based on Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, as well as
two important and challenging clarinet primers, the 12 Etudes for
Clarinet, and Advanced Studies
for Clarinet. Polatschek was also a musical adviser to the Edward B.
Marks Music Corporation.
In 1930, at the urging of Maestro Serge
Koussevitsky, Polatschek emigrated to the U.S. to join the Boston Symphony
Orchestra(BSO), and shortly thereafter was named principal clarinet of the Orchestra.
During his 18 years with the BSO, Polatschek played the lead parts of the wondrous
clarinet literature for symphonic ensembles. He soloed in the Mozart Concerto K.V.
622 on November 14 and 15, 1930, and the Brahms Quintet for clarinet and
strings, Op 115, on April 27, 1933.
Polatschek continued teaching at
Tanglewood at the Berkshire Music Festival during the 1930s and 1940s. He was
said by one of his students, Professor Henry Gulick of Indiana University, to
be “an impeccable musician, with great taste in music, with a very courtly and
refined personality.”
On July 27, 1948, while rehearsing the
Bach-Mozart series of concerts with the BSO at the Berkshire Music festival at
Tanglewood, Polatschek sustained what was presumed to be a massive heart attack, was
moved to a hospital in Stockbridge,
Massachusetts for treatment, and died.
He was 60 years of age. His widow and sister survived him.
According to Pamela Weston, in her book
More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past, referenced in the FSU PhD
thesis of TL Paddock in 2011, “A Biographical Dictionary of American
clarinetists,” Vienna’s clarinetists, including Polatschek and Wlach, played a
German-made clarinet, the Oehler-Albert system clarinet, which is also called
the “German ‘simple system’ clarinet.”
A short the history of the clarinet
The clarinet, a single reed instrument
developed from the ancient chalumeau, was largely the work of the workshop of Johann
Christoph Denner of Nuremberg. By 1707, Denner had perfected an instrument which we would recognize
today as a primitive clarinet, with few holes and minimal keys. Over the next
century, various design modifications took place to allow the still evolving clarinet to
play several octaves, with all notes largely in tune.
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| A modern day clarinet |
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Two Denner clarinets from the early 1700s.
Note the minimal use of keys.
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In 1810, Iwan Müller (Ivan Mueller) developed
a clarinet mechanism that he called the “German simple system” which included
two “brille” (spectacle-looking metal rings) on the upper joint. It was Müller
who had the clever idea to add pads of kid leather stuffed with felt to the
keys, and countersink the holes, creating air-tight seals, and thus improving
the clarinet’s chromatics dramatically.
Oskar Oehler (1858-1936) combined the
so-called Albert clarinet system of Belgium (1844) with Muller’s German “simple
system,” and added his own modifications, to create the Albert/Muller/Oehler clarinet system.
The Oehler system "adds tone holes to
correct intonation and acoustic deficiencies, notably of the forked notes (B♭ and F). The system
has more keys than the Boehm system,up to 27 in the Voll-Oehler system (full
Oehler system). It also has a narrower bore and a longer, narrower mouthpiece
leading to a slightly different sound. It is used mostly in Germany and
Austria. Major developments include the patent C♯, low E-F correction,
fork-F/B♭ correction and fork B♭."
Franz Koktan was a Viennese maker of
Oehler-system clarinets (Anthony Baines, Woodwind Instruments). Viktor
Polatschek and Leopold Wlach, Polatschek’s student and another prominent
clarinetist, played Oehler clarinets. Wlach succeeded Polatschek as principal
clarinet of the VPO and VSO after Polatschek moved to Boston.
The clarinets that Polatschek and Wlach
played were crafted by Franz Koktan and his son, Franz II (Franz junior), who
continued his father’s clarinet workshop from 1907 to 1945. The following data
about the Franz Koktan clarinet manufacturing family was obtained from The
New Langwill Index:
Koktan, (1) Franz (b) Klein
Oreschowitz / Bohemia 12 July 1842; (d) Wien (Vienna) 3 September 1901) WWI ; fl
Wien (Vienna), 1880-1901. From the same village as Bradka, he is first listed in Wien in
1880 as a specialist in clarinet.
EXHIBITION:
Wien 1888, 1892 (flute, clarinet,
bassoon).
Koktan, (2) Franz, junior (b)
Wien 29 January 1881; (d) ibid October 1971) WWI fl Wien 1907-c
1945. Son of (1), he worked in the shop after his father’s death; 1907
successor; 1924 admitted master. Clarinet specialist; reported to have
attempted between the wars to manufacture the Heckel-model bassoon in Vienna.
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Eric Simon
(N.B. I have researched Eric Simon's
life from his memoirs and papers, which reside in an archive that his family
donated to Yale, and which is now accessible as: The Eric Simon Papers in the
Irving S Gilmore Music Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT.)
Eric Simon (1907-1994) was a
clarinetist, composer, music editor, and one of the great clarinet pedagogues
of the 20th century. He and his good friend and colleague Leon
Russianoff trained many of the world's greatest clarinetists in the
mid-twentieth century.
Eric Simon was born in Vienna in 1907
and began to play piano at age 8. In 1921, at age 14, he switched to clarinet,
and began taking clarinet lessons from Viktor Polatschek in Vienna, at which
time Polatschek was principal clarinetist of the Vienna Philharmonic and the
Vienna Staatsoper. After Polatschek came to America to join the Boston
Symphony Orchestra as its principal clarinet, Simon continued to study with
Polatschek's successor at the Vienna Philharmonic, Leopold Wlach. Polatscek and
Wlach both played German-system clarinets - the Albert/Muller/Oehler clarinets.
Simon moved to Sherman CT in 1949
where he lived for the rest of his life. From there, he traveled into NYC to
teach at Mannes College of Music, to give clarinet lessons and to edit,
transpose and transcribe a significant amount of the clarinet literature, for
several music publishing houses. Many of
today’s most popular clarinet music scores, from Schirmer’s Music Publications
and International Music, bear the name of Eric Simon in the top left corner,
right under the name of the composer.
--------------------------------------------------------------
My own musical journey began in
elementary school when I sang in the chorus in a 1960 performance H.M.S.
Pinafore. Our family moved to Garden City in 1961, where I began fifth
grade. It was the afternoon of October 3rd of 1961, during the New
York Yankees-Cincinnati Reds World Series, that my father, who was not a
baseball fan at all (he, being Italian, much preferred soccer to baseball),
came home carrying three musical instruments, a flute, a trumpet and a
clarinet, to see if I might want to take music lessons. He asked me to try
them, which I did (after the Yankee-Reds game, of course, which the Yanks won),
and, for some still inexplicable reason, liking the sound and feel of the
clarinet the best, I chose that instrument and never looked back
Fifth and sixth grade were a joyous musical
time. Our music teacher and conductor, Mr. Thomas E. Wagner, was legendary
throughout not only Nassau County but all of New York State (NYS Teacher of the
Year) as a music instructor and pedagogue, and somewhat of a "pied
piper" to his music students, as he too was a clarinetist. Several of my
classmates and schoolmates who also played under him as their band director
have gone on to professional music careers (Douglas Hedwig at the Met Opera
Orchestra on trumpet, Mark De Turk as a professional clarinetist and university
musicologist, and pianist and organist John Tesh, of Entertainment Tonight
and "The Red Rocks").
Although middle school music was a blur
of squeaks and squawks, I stuck with the clarinet, to the consternation of my
sisters in the next bedroom, but in high school things took off. Our high
school band and orchestra conductor was the disciplinarian and perfectionist,
Mr. John Chadderdon, himself also a clarinetist. Those of us who were serious
about our instruments were expected to audition for both. Mr. Chadderdon
expected, and received, nothing less than excellence at all times. He rehearsed
us intensely, and took us to the NYSMA (New York State Music Association) competitions
each year, where we played the highest (6A) level compositions, and won each of
the three years I was in high school. Indeed, senior year, our concert band
played the band transcriptions of the complete Borodin second symphony and the
Dvorak ninth symphony in concert !
In high school, I studied with Paul
Doty, who was a clarinetist with both the New York City Ballet and New York
City Opera. In my senior year, as was the custom for first desk players, I got
to choose a solo piece to play with the symphonic band. I wanted to perform the
Weber Concertino or the Mozart Concerto, but the latter was too
long, and (Mark) DeTurk, one year ahead of me, had played the Weber the year
before. So I chose the Ernesto Cavallini Introduction, Theme and Variations.
It thankfully went well, in late December of 1968, despite the fact that I had
a 100 degree fever that night. I crashed at home through the week of winter
break, too feverish and weak to attend my grandfather's funeral three days
later.
I also was invited to play saxophone in
a rock band, the All-American Band (which included Hedwig and Tesh, as well as
Bob Eggers, a superb vocalist and guitarist, who went on to Yale and became
pitchpipe of Yale's Whiffenpoofs, America's oldest a cappella singing group,
and is the currently active as the group's archivist). This rock band was a
great escape from academic work and gave me a taste of the great pleasure and
great challenges of learning to play improvisationally.
I went on to Princeton University the
following fall, and stayed with the clarinet, joining the infamous Princeton
University Band, where I helped to write those hilarious and very off-color
half-time shows for which certain Ivy schools (Princeton, Yale, Harvard and
Columbia) are well-known. In the fall of 1972, as Band president my senior
year, I remember being in One Nassau Hall (once the capital of the United
States during the Revolutionary War) on more than one occasion, in then President
Robert Goheen's office, trying to explain why Princeton's alumni shouldn't be that
upset in their numerous phone calls and letters they sent President Goheen about the
salacious double entendres we were announcing and playing on the football
field ! That is when Princeton University first initiated a censorship board to
"help out" the Band with its half-time shows.
Off the football field, the Symphonic
Band was led by the beloved Dr. David Uber, principal trombone of the New York
City Ballet, and a fine interpreter of the music of William Schumann, Gustav
Holst and Percy Grainger. The Princeton University Symphonic Band joined forces
with Harvard's Symphonic Band to perform at Avery Fisher Hall in the spring of 1972,
which we recorded on vinyl LP, essaying Holst's Planets, and Grainger’s Lincolnshire
Posey.
During medical school at Weill Cornell
Medical College, I continued with the clarinet, playing occasionally with the
Doctors' Symphony, which back then met at the 92nd street Y or at Mount Sinai.
As an intern and fellow in San Francisco, I had just enough extra money to take
lessons with David Breeden, then the principal clarinet of the San Francisco
Symphony, and during ophthalmology residency at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute
in Miami, I studied with William Klinger, the principal clarinet of the Florida
Philharmonic. While in Miami, I got to meet a former violinist of the Budapest
String Quartet, a Mr. Polyatkin, who had retired to Miami Beach, and spent
several remarkable evenings with him and his new string quartet, playing the
Mozart and the Brahms quintets. On one memorable night, Mr. Polyatkin and his
wife invited me to accompany them to hear the Beaux Arts Trio at the Dade
County Auditorium. After the performance I spent that evening in the Green Room
with the Polyatkins and the Beaux Arts’ great musicians, Isidore Cohen, Bernard
Greenhouse and Menaheim Pressler, listening to their marvelous stories about
the glories of chamber music before and after the Great War.
During my thirty-year career as a
clinical ophthalmologist, I stayed close to the clarinet and classical music. I
began to delve deeper into the clarinet chamber literature, with piano or
strings, giving a number of lecture-recitals on Mozart, Brahms, Schubert and
Schumann, interpolating the backstory of their musical lives and medical
illnesses with performances of their ineffable chamber works for clarinet.
In 1991, I organized and lectured at
The Connecticut Mozart Festival, a thirteen-concert Festschrift of
Mozart and his music, to honor the bicentenary of the composer's death (and
finally got to play that Mozart Concerto, dressed up as Anton Stadler, to
boot). Earlier, in 1987, I collaborated with Jonathan Lass M.D., a fine
cellist, professor and chair of ophthalmology at Case Western Reserve
University in Cleveland, in founding the annual classical music recital that
took place annually for twenty years, during the meetings of the American
Academy of Ophthalmology. A remarkable number of ophthalmologists are also
outstanding instrumentalists and vocalists, and the orchestra was of the
highest caliber given that these musicians were not music professionals.
Six years into my career as an
ophthalmologist, in 1988, I began to care for a patient, Mrs G.L. Born in
Vienna, she was a Mozart lover, and having found out about my own love of
Mozart and the clarinet, began to help translate some of the German primary
sources I showed her of Mozart's life and medical problems. She invited me to
lecture and perform in recital at Heritage Village, the retirement community in
which she lived, and told me in passing that she happened to be the first
cousin of a certain Mr Eric Simon, and whether I had heard of him.
I was elated to hear of this coincidence,
because, as every clarinetist knew, Eric Simon was the pre-eminent clarinet
pedagogue and musical editor for our instrument. "Edited by Eric
Simon" or "Transcribed and Transposed by Eric Simon" was a
common finding in many Schirmer editions and International Music editions for
the clarinet. In fact, the edition of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto KV 622,
published by Schirmer, in the reduction from A clarinet and orchestra to Bb
clarinet and piano, was the product of Eric Simon's editing and transposition.
It remains a classic edition and is still one of Schirmer's best sellers.
Over the ensuing years, Mrs. L. kept
asking me if I wanted to meet Mr. Simon, and of course, I said yes each time.
But, for some reason, I didn’t get around
to it for another five years. During that time, Mr. Simon would call me at home
or on my cell phone (quite new then), often at odd times of day, in that quiet,
mysterious, Yoda-like voice of his : "Vincent, this is Ehreek
Sigh-Mohn" and we would talk, often for hours, about the clarinet, its
textures and nuances, about various interpretations of the clarinet literature,
about which was the best clarinet book I had read (a tie between Jack Brymer’s
and Keith Wilson's), about whether I liked Reginall Kell more than Frederick
Thurston (I liked Kell more), about what I thought of Richard Stoltzman's
vibrato (I liked it because it was Dick Stoltzman’s after all, and I didnt
think it was overdone) and about how amazing it was that there had finally been
a female member of the Berlin Philharmonic, (and this under von Karajan!), and
it was a clarinetist, the brilliant Sabine Meyer. Often, on these phone calls,
he would ask me to visit him, but I always demurred, what with patients the
next day, or surgery to do, soccer or swim practice with the kids, vacations
and all of the rest of life that took precedence.
In June, 1994, during one of Mr.
Simon's phone calls to me, he at one point in the conversation casually asked
once again for me to come visit him at his home. This time, out of a
combination of respect for him and sheer exhaustion, I agreed. He asked me to
bring my Bb clarinet, to prepare the first Brahms clarinet sonata, the f minor,
Op. 120 No.1, with its difficult opening measures of vast and exposed intervals,
and to bring the score that he had edited from Schirmer's.
How did he know I had that particular
score? I guess because everybody
who played the clarinet at the time had that score, which Simon edited, in the
volume “Masterworks for Clarinet and Piano;” that was the score from which we
all learned the Brahms sonatas. The original 1896 Simrock edition (Simrock was
Brahms' publisher in Leipzig) was too difficult for us American
clarinetists to obtain.
I practiced the Brahms for about a
week, and called Mr Simon back that I was ready to come to see him. It was to
be the following Saturday. It turned out that he lived in Sherman, Connecticut,
only about forty minutes away from my home, another curious coincidence.
I got there around 11 am, to see a
lovely, tidy, one-story steel and glass house not dissimilar from the famous
Philip Johnson "Glass House" in New Canaan, set back from a pond on a
verdant piece of land, forested with enough trees to create a dappled effect on
it.
I entered through an open door into a
small vestibule which opened onto a large living room. A Steinway grand piano was
in one corner, near the only bank of windows, which faced the pond, but every
other space- wall and floor, and cabinet- was covered with sheet music!
There was no place to sit, because the
couch and all the chairs also had sheet music on them. Mr. Simon was in the
corner near the piano, hunched over gnome-like, and greeted me
enthusiastically. He asked me to take out my clarinet, put the Brahms score on
the music stand that was already set up, and begin the f minor sonata, he
accompanying on piano.
After the eighth measure, he stopped
me. I shuddered, expecting the worse. And it came. He paused, and then for the
next thirty minutes, he critiqued my playing, the quality of my tone, the
tightness of my embouchure, my tonguing, my legato, my phrasing. I was so
embarrassed and angry at myself that I had actually driven up there just to be
humiliated like that, that I wanted to leave. He sensed my frustration because
at that moment he said: "Vincent, don’t worry. Last Saturday morning,
Richard Stoltzman was standing right where you are standing, and I critiqued
him just as severely!"
What ??!!
Things went better from there, and I
got through the first movement reasonably unscathed. I really wanted to go on
and play the autumnal, elegiac and poignant second movement with him, but we
never did.
Instead, he began to talk to me about
the clarinet and its history, and he started
to show me some musical scores; first editions dating back
to the 1890s, of the two Brahms sonatas and the quintet and trio, of the original 1920 Durand
edition of the Saint-Saens sonata, of the first edition of the Poulenc sonata,
of an early edition of the sinfonia
concertante for winds and orchestra (KV 297b, Anhang 14.01) that may or may
not have been one of Mozart’s compositions, of his (Simon's) correspondences
with his friend Leon Russianoff, and of letters from and to Benny Goodman.
It was amazing.
I was witnessing music history.
Here was a master teacher of the
clarinet, of my chosen instrument, one of the last living links
between the great 19th century and early 20th century clarinetists
of Vienna, Germany and France, of Langenus and Bellison and Bonade, and the
present day. I was at once astonished and mesmerized. I didn’t realize that
four hours had already passed by that point, and I told Mr. Simon I really had
to go.
As I left his home and was walking to
my car, he called me back and said that he wanted to give me something. So I
went back to the front door and he handed me a large and heavy cardboard box,
and told me to look inside.
In it were dozens of scores.! And what
wonders were contained therein !
I had a glimpse of the Simrock first
edition of the great b minor Brahms clarinet quintet and the Simock edition of the two Brahms clarinet sonatas as well ! There was the Saint-Saens sonata,
one of the Weber concertos, the Poulenc sonata and the d’Indy
trio, and a number of chamber works by composers I had never heard of
(and I thought I knew the clarinet chamber literature).
Beneath the scores, there was also a black music case. Mr. Simon asked me to open it, which I did, and he said,
"Vincent, these are Viktor Polatschek's clarinets. You know the name. He
was the principal clarinetist of the Boston Symphony for many years."
Actually, at that time, I didn’t know that name at all. And, I also didn’t know what
to say.
What I did notice was that the
clarinets in that music case weren't Boehm-system instruments; that is, they weren't the
French-made Klose/Buffet Boehm system, which is what most of us play in the US.
I assumed that they were German clarinets, with the Albert/Oehler system, to
which Mr. Simon concurred, and I told him that I probably couldn’t get a good sound
from them. He responded that I needn't worry, and
that I should just take care of them. I thanked him profusely for these gifts
and I left.
There were a few more phone calls with
him over the summer, mostly of me thanking him for his largesse, but those
phone calls came to an end too.
Mr. Simon passed away four months
later, in October 1994, at the age of 87. I had given him my word that I would
take care of the clarinets, and indeed, the clarinets have laid safely in my
library for the last eighteen years. The scores still do as well, and when I
play the Brahms sonatas, the Saint-Saens, the Mozart, I only play from the
editions which he gave me. For some reason, I feel closer to the composers and
to their music when I do.
---------------------------------------
In 2009, I began
to correspond with Dr Nick Zervas, a neurosurgeon at the
Massachusetts General Hospital and a board member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, about the
possibility of donating the two Albert/Oehler system clarinets to the
Orchestra, for them to archive, house and display in Symphony Hall. I had never played the two instruments that Mr
Simon had kindly given me, but I felt over the years that they should
eventually be donated to a musical institution, and returning them to the BSO
was the right thing to do.
I
didn’t have any documentation, besides Mr. Simon's parting words to me, that
they were Polatschek’s.
I examined the clarinets under high magnification, identifying the etched
inscriptions of "F. Koktan, Wien" on the upper and lower joints of both clarinets, noting the Albert/Oehler mechanisms in both
instruments, marveling at the fine condition of the East African hardwood (Melanoxylon dahlbergii) of which they were composed, Piecing together the findings and the three interdigitated stories, I became certain that the two clarinets that Mr. Simon gave me that
day in the summer of 1994 were indeed the clarinets of his teacher, Viktor
Polatschek, of the Vienna Philharmonic, Vienna StaatsOper and Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I then had the clarinets evaluated by a highly regarded organologist and renowned historian of the clarinet, who researched the serial numbers on the upper and lower
joints of both instruments and confirmed that the clarinets were made in Vienna in Koktan's workshop between 1905 and 1910.
On August 12, 2012, under the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood, during the intermission between the Beethoven Fourth Symphony and the Mozart Piano Concerto No, 23, in A, KV 488, with the help of Bridget Carr and Jill Ng at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, I donated these two splendid, Viennese clarinets to the Orchestra. The donation took place at a sacred source of classical music, at one of its epicenters, Tanglewood, in Lenox Massachusetts, where Viktor Polatschek played those clarinets so elegantly, each summer from 1930 to 1948.
 |
BSO Archivist Bridget Carr receiving the
Polatschek clarinets from me at Tanglewood
Aug 12, 2012 |
I have helped ensure that these two historical instruments have been brought back to their last musical home, to Symphony Hall in Boston, where, under the baton of Maestro Serge Koussevitsky, the clarinetist Viktor Polatschek played them so marvelously those many years ago.
Sic transit gloria mundi
 |
At Symphony Hall in Boston on Saturday, May 5, 2013
with the Polatschek clarinets on display. |
 |
Polatschek clarinet mouthpiece .
Note the multicolored sock swab
| |
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The Polatschek clarinets on display
at Symphony Hall | |
|
@ Vincent P. de Luise MD, A Musical
Vision, 2013.
