King of the Reeds

"For forty years I have play the oboe." confessed Marcel Tabuteau, "and still I never know what is coming out. It is a perpetual anxiety. But maybe this is good --I have never the time to get myself bored."

Most intractable of all orchestral instruments, the oboe keeps all its players anxious. Their worries are perhaps responsible for the legend that oboists inevitably go crazy. The silvery, reedy beauty of fine oboe tone is won only by the most skillful and unrelenting war against squeaks. In this war no one is more skillful than Marcel Tabuteau. This grey-haired, brawny, 55-year-old Frenchman earns about $300 a week as the star of the Philadelphia Orchestra's unsurpassed wood winds.

Tabuteau's technique is matched by his musicianship. He can turn a melodic phrase with a lyric grace matched by few virtuosos of any instrument. Famous pianists and violinists who play with the Philadelphia Orchestra listen reverently to the accent of his Beethoven or Brahms. Other oboists* listen to Philadelphia recordings and performances just to study Tabuteau.

An oboist's technique begins long before he puts his instrument to his mouth. For Tabuteau, it begins in his medieval-looking fourth-floor workshop. There he whittles to perfection the paper-thin, cigaret-shaped reeds on whose shaping and adjustment oboe tone heavily depends. A flawed reed can make even the best playing sound like a tin horn. Tabuteau spends hours every day scraping away with a razorlike knife.

Last week he had an additional worry: his reed supply. The cane from which oboe reeds are made grows only in the glens around the town of Frejus in southern France. Until the defeat of Hitler, Tabuteau's career rests on a dwindling hoard of a few hundred twigs of cane kept on a Philadelphia shelf.

Tabuteau can usually forget his troubles by eating. A gourmet of parts, he has come to the conclusion that there is no U.S. restaurant which can provide him with a decent meal. "If I want something good to eat," says he, "I cook it myself." He bathes his Poulet Chasseur and Boeuf aux Champignons in vintage wines. One product of this hobby is chronic gout.

*Among the world's other top-rankers are: London's Leon Goossens (brother of the Cincinnati Symphony's Conductor Eugene Goossens); the Boston Symphony's Fernand Gillet; the New York Philharmonic-Symphony's Bruno Labate.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.