There are two kinds of celebrities in the classical-music world. There are your Lang Langs and Gustavo Dudamels—fêted regularly in the Times, selling out a concert hall at a moment’s notice. Then there are the names that ring out through the halls of conservatories across the country—working musicians who possess superhuman abilities and populate orchestras in cities major and minor.
The trumpeter Philip Smith is in that latter category, which is why his retirement last month from the New York Philharmonic is headline news only in certain circles. On Saturday, the Philharmonic will honor him with “A Celebration of Phil Smith” featuring the orchestra’s brass-and-percussion ensemble. Smith is not alone among major Philharmonic retirees this season, who also include Glenn Dicterow, the orchestra’s concertmaster. Dicterow has cultivated a honeyed tone that has given the Philharmonic a particularly Old World sound for thirty-four years—and certainly deserves the major sendoff he has been given this season—but he does not loom as large in the violin world as Smith does among brass players. Violinists have hundreds of superstars to model themselves after, from Itzhak Perlman to Hilary Hahn. The world of classical trumpet, with only a handful of virtuoso soloists outside the orchestral tradition, has Smith.
For the past thirty-six years, Smith has presided over orchestral trumpet playing, with a resonant, clarion sound and a reputation for never missing a note. When I studied at Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music—a brass-heavy conservatory, with its close proximity to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—trumpeters talked about him in hushed tones. There were local models, of course, but Smith cultivated a certain air of plainspoken mystery. An active member of the Salvation Army church, he was a rare brass player whose religious convictions seemed directly to inform his sterling timbre. You couldn’t learn to play like Phil Smith; you simply heard what he did and tried to imitate it as best as possible.
Two relatively recent additions to the Philharmonic’s trumpet section agree. In April, during a break in rehearsals at Avery Fisher Hall, I met with Matthew Muckey and Ethan Bensdorf, two of the orchestra’s trumpeters. They grew up venerating Smith, only to find themselves his colleagues in their early twenties. Muckey became associate principal trumpet in 2006, and Bensdorf joined the section two years later. After Smith’s retirement this season, both will remain with the orchestra while trumpeters audition to fill the major lacuna he leaves. (Muckey plans on taking the audition.)
Smith declined to be present as I interviewed his colleagues, so we talked a couple days later. (He was worried, unjustifiably, that they might speak ill of him.) We listened to trumpet recordings: with Muckey and Bensdorf, to a sampling of Smith’s greatest solo and orchestral moments; with Smith, to his own models, and to works from his years at the Philharmonic and as a soloist.
Brass players are tinkerers at heart, always exploring the possibility that a minute change in lip or tongue placement might unlock new sonic worlds. Smith, though, seems to transcend technique. “No matter how hard something actually is, it never sounds that way—it always sounds effortless,” Bensdorf said as we listened. Smith’s ethos revolves around listening and singing, concepts so abstract as to seem meaningless, but which nevertheless compel the musicians around him. “Most of the time, Phil wouldn’t even need to say anything. He just plays it and you know,” Muckey added. “That’s what makes him such a great leader: people are drawn to his sound.”
Born in England but raised on Long Island, Smith grew up in the Salvation Army church, which has a long tradition of brass-band playing. He studied cornet with his father, a prominent soloist. He excelled in the Salvation Army bands, but also admired recordings of famous trumpeters like Maurice André and Rafael Méndez,. “This was stuff that got you excited as a kid—you said, ‘Man, I gotta do this,’ ” Smith told me, listening to André and Méndez on recording. “You hadn’t achieved anything until you could imitate it.”
That approach helped Smith to win a spot at Juilliard, though he knew little of the brass tradition taught in conservatories. He wasn’t allowed to play in Juilliard’s orchestra for his first two years; Smith was yelled out of an audition by the school’s conductor because he had never learned how to transpose—reading a trumpet part in one key and quickly adapting it to a different one, an essential orchestral skill. But, soon after beginning a master’s degree, studying with William Vacchiano—the Philharmonic’s former principal trumpeter—he won an audition for the Chicago Symphony.
“The advantage that I had was coming from a church background, a hymnody background,” Smith said. “The way I was taught was ‘Always sing, always play the lyrics.’ ” That sustained lyricism is the quintessential Smith sound. “There’s such a singing quality,” Bensdorf told me. “It’s not even like you’re listening to an instrumentalist—it’s like you’re listening to someone use their natural equipment to sing.” In concert, Smith will often sing along with the orchestra when he’s not playing.
Smith had barely three years of orchestral experience when he won the Chicago job. Bensdorf and Muckey had more than ten under their belts when they joined the Philharmonic. They shared a common lineage in the form of the Chicago brass sound, having both studied at Northwestern. Smith’s Chicago years were essentially an apprenticeship in orchestral practice, guided by legendary principal trumpeter Bud Herseth, who had a fifty-three-year career with the symphony and is widely considered the greatest orchestral trumpeter of all time. Smith called Herseth his “Gabriel”—”post-graduate study in the Chicago Symphony was the best course I ever had,” he told me. He cut his teeth on the Chicago orchestral repertoire, learning the big, brassy symphonies of Mahler and Bruckner.
Smith joined the Philharmonic in 1978, and has played a prominent role in the orchestra’s sound since. He fondly reminisced about encounters with conductors like Zubin Mehta, Erich Leinsdorf, and Klaus Tennstedt, who shaped his understanding of the epic trumpet solo that opens Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Tennstedt “spoke about this hand coming out of darkness, this hand of death. Each time it came, it came closer,” Smith said, singing the part. “Dagga da da—it came closer—dagga da da—and it went back. Dagga da daaa—he wanted the fourth note each time to be longer, because he wanted this hand to have motion. Dagga da deeeem. Dagga datt,” he cut off, abruptly. “Death got ya. And, at that point, death struts its stuff, and off you go.”
Too often are orchestral musicians considered cogs within a machine, interchangeable parts of a system over which they have little interpretative control. It’s assumed that the impassioned performances of Beethoven or Shostakovich that one hears in Avery Fisher or Disney Hall flow directly from the all-encompassing philosophy of a conductor, who molds the orchestra to suit his will. But the highly idiosyncratic training of an orchestra’s members—who draw on their conservatory backgrounds, as well as decades of working with radically different conductors and colleagues—undergirds each performance. The particular sonic world that an orchestra inhabits is the result of the conglomeration of its players, a collaboration between dozens of individualized interpretations shaped by the singular vision of a music director.
Orchestral musicians have a bit more prominence today, as they increasingly take on public roles as negotiators in labor disputes. (The musicians of several ensembles, including Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Minnesota Orchestra, have created their own Web sites as a form of advocacy; the Philharmonic, which amicably agreed on a new contact last year, is a notable exception.) But often lost in the solidarity fostered by contract debates is the degree to which an orchestra is the composite of virtuosos like Smith.
Smith has maintained warm relationships with the Philharmonic’s music directors, but his reserved composure always comes first. “I never liked being chummy; I don’t think that’s a healthy place to be,” he said. “But I did like the rapport and the professionalism that went back and forth.” In 1985, Smith recorded Copland’s “Quiet City” with the orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. “He was such a neat guy to play with—you just wanted to play for him. He just exuded music and passion. Whether or not you like the concept, I don’t care. There was something going on, and you just gave it your absolute best.”
That intimate, restrained recording is a touchstone for Muckey and Bensdorf. “Nothing ever sounds hectic or hurried with him, and so every note has meaning,” Bensdorf said, after we listened to it. “There’s such a complexity to his sound,” Muckey added. “You can be listening to one part of his sound and say ‘Oh, that’s so bright and brilliant.’ And then, one second he changes it to a dark and mellow sound. And that is so difficult to do, and he does it so easily.”
The eternal concern of brass players—and trumpeters in particular, whose best orchestral moments send them to the stratosphere of their instruments’ range—is the frack: in the heat of the moment, a desired note is replaced with a bleat, buzz, or shriek. Reliability is valued as much as beauty of sound. Tracking Smith since their teens, Muckey and Bensdorf have been consistently impressed by his consistency. “I think, besides his sound, that’s probably what he’s most known for—just never missing,” Muckey said_._
“They’re liars,” Smith said to me when I told him what Muckey alleged. “Everybody cracks notes. The idea is to press on; the idea is to put something else out there that someone grabs ahold of, so that they don’t remember the crack. The cracks are gonna happen.”
“Every once in a while, you do hear Phil crack a note,” Bensdorf admitted. “Nobody’s perfect, and it made me feel so much more at ease that even Phil Smith is human. But just barely.”
I played a 2012 live recording of Mussorgksy’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” for the two young trumpeters—a performance that Bensdorf had played in. Lead trumpeters typically favor a martial, foursquare approach to the opening “Promenade,” perfecting each individual note but losing the sense of a continuous stroll through a gallery. Smith instead glides through the orchestra, each note gem-like but flowing to the next.
“It almost appears like one note comes out of the last,” Muckey said. “Which is what it’s supposed to sound like,” Bensdorf interjected. “But I never really quite grasped that concept until I got here and had no choice but to absorb that, too. It’s not necessarily the volume that gets you heard, it’s the sustain. The singing and the resonance: everything means something.”
Smith was quite emotional when we met, having spent the past several days listening to old recordings and ruminating on his legacy. In the fall, he will begin teaching at the University of Georgia, putting pedagogy before performance for the first time. A thirty-six-year career in the same orchestra means that expectations can remain high over a lifetime. “People keep showing up, and they want Mahler’s Fifth in 2013 to sound as good as it did in 1978,” he said. “And you’re going, ‘Shoot, man, I’m not sure if I can do that.’ So you have to watch the little voices and try to shove them out of the way.”
“Try not to get focussed on mistakes. It’s like watching the Olympics—how many times you know these people are tops of their field, they get to the Olympics and the voices win. So it’s a constant battle to say, ‘Don’t let the voices win.’ Sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. When the voices start going, start singing.”
Photograph by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty.
