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Two Met Orchestra Members Retire After 46 Years

May 11, 2007

The Met salutes two members of the orchestra retiring this season after 46 years with the company: French horn player Howard T. Howard and violinist Leslie Dreyer.

Howard, who was raised in Montana and eventually found his way to New York via Detroit, was named principal just one year after joining the orchestra in 1961. “I can’t imagine having spent a life any better,” says Howard, who has watched as the orchestra and the horn section have risen to the level of pre-eminence they hold today. (There’s another institution that is also said to have risen to pre-eminence under Howard’s leadership: the notorious green table in the corner of the Orchestra Lounge, home to one of the world’s longest-running poker games.)

“We horn players, we don’t have to skydive,” notes Howard. “A Siegfried call on your own, the Julius Caesar obbligato solo…that’s enough adrenaline.”

Howard Howard was the college roommate of the legendary University of Michigan symphonic band conductor H. Robert Reynolds (who also studied horn).

SignOnSanDiego.com is running an interview with hornist Julie Landsman of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in New York. Interestingly, the article choses to focus a lot of attention on the fact that Julie is a woman:

She still relishes the startled reaction of the all-male judging panel when she appeared from behind the screen that was used to ensure impartiality.

“They gasped. It was a beautiful moment in time. I loved it,” recalled Landsman, who performs this weekend at the Mainly Mozart Festival. “I don't think I would have won that audition if they had known I was a woman. My gut feeling is, had the screen not been there, their eyes would have affected their ears.”

The article even manages to drool over the fact that female students have success studying with Landsman:

Several of her female students – she calls them “my girls” – have joined the Met's French horn section after winning their behind-the-screen auditions.

It is really too bad that this dead horse got beaten up one more time for the article; very few people are surprised any more when a woman (*gasp*) manages to play the horn well. The readership of SignOnSanDiego.com really missed an opportunity to find out something interesting from Ms. Landsman, such as what does it feel like to be the principle horn of a major orchestra? Or how has the orchestra scene changed during the time of her tenure? Or in what ways, if any, is technology and the Internet influencing classical music?

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Roster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra