The Dorian Mode

Lightning arpeggios bounce from clarinet to oboe. A perfectly articulated trill decorates a French horn solo. The musicianship is impeccable. But technics aside, the Dorian Quintet-the world's most active wind quintet-has several exceptional features: a completely booked calendar (75 concerts in 1973), a nearly six-figure collective income and an ample inventory of music to play.

Music to play? "Yes," sighs Jane Taylor, the Dorian bassoonist, "I've seen other wind quintets disband simply because they've run out of things to play." The Dorian's solution to the scanty quintet repertory has been virtually to create a new one. In its agile, luminous concert at Manhattan's Lincoln Center last week, the group played 19th Century Czech Composer Anton Reicha's forgotten E-Flat-Major Quintet, Henry Brant's transcription of Bach's Goldberg Variations and a new work that it commissioned from Pulitzer Prize Composer Jacob Druckman, "Delizie Contente Che L'Alme Beate"After Francesco Cavalli for Woodwind Quintet and Tape (1913).

Floating Residency. "Our sound is flowing," explains French Horn Player Barry Benjamin from behind a bristling walrus mustache. "It would be ideal if we never had to breathe-although Olivier's breathing never harmed his Hamlet." Even pausing for breath, the Dorian has achieved an increasingly secure rank as one of chamber music's most sparkling and eloquent ensembles. In 1969 Brooklyn College appointed its members to posts on the music faculty. At about the same time, the State University of New York assigned the group to a "floating residency" consisting of one-to four-day concert-lecture programs at 15 to 20 colleges within the state system each year.

The Dorian-whose members range in age from 36 to 41-evolved from a group formed during the 1961 summer season at Tanglewood. Since then, shifts in personnel (only Taylor, who left the New York City Opera orchestra for the Dorian, is a survivor of the original unit) have entailed a search for players of a very special type. Each, like exuberant Clarinetist Jerry Kirkbride, must be of soloist caliber yet have the temperament that prizes subtle, intimate musical expression over the splashy sound and bravura display of solo and orchestral work. Each, whether he is naturally lighthearted, like Flutist Karl ("Fritz") Kraber, or intensely dedicated, like Oboist Charles Kuskin, must have the empathy to take a tempo from a nod or a cue from a raised eyebrow.

Such compatibility produces a winning ease both onstage and off. At a concert for Navajo schoolchildren in Arizona, Benjamin showed up bearing, instead of his horn, a garden hose with a mouthpiece at one end and a funnel attached to the other. Next day many of the reservation's garden hoses disappeared as the youngsters made their own versions of the contraption. At one Sunday matinee in Louisville the Dorian whipped through its program with demonic virtuosity, then dashed offstage, leaving the audience and critics dazzled but a bit bewildered. Was it a seizure of inspiration? A defiant show-off stunt? Hardly. The group-football fans all -was eager to see the Super Bowl, which was being shown on television at the same time as its concert. Recalls Benjamin: "We played so fast-no repeats-that we arrived back at the hotel in the middle of the first quarter."

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