Word: tabuteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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 Fréjus 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...