My father was a native of Cleveland. He started out as a violinist when he was nine years old. When he was in the seventh grade, his orchestra conductor, Ralph Rush, who was well known in music education circles, announced that he had an oboe sitting on the shelf and would anyone like to learn how to play it. My father said he liked Mr. Rush, and so he raised his hand. No one else did. He said “I’ll ask at home” and came back the next day and said it was OK. No one in the family of course, including my father, had any idea of what is involved in playing the oboe. He took the instrument and was about to leave when Mr. Rush said: “Wait! You can’t play it yet. You have to have a reed!”

His first teacher in Cleveland was a high school student, Isadore Goldblum, who went on to study at Curtis with Tabuteau. For several years my father played both the violin and the oboe, and eventually gave up the violin. During his senior year in high school (Shaker Heights High School in Cleveland) in April, 1935, he auditioned at Curtis for Tabuteau. He said there were a number of people in the common room that day, including Harold Gomberg, who was just graduating and was about to go to the St. Louis Symphony. He asked my father to play something. He did, and Gomberg said: “You’ll get in.” Also there was his younger brother Ralph Gomberg, who hadn’t started at Curtis yet, and Harry Shulman. Also, flutist Julius Baker, who my father knew from growing up in Cleveland.

At his audition, he played a movement from the Concert Piece by Julius Rietz and the Ferling Etude #4. And Tabuteau had him sight read the second movement of the Handel g minor sonata.

My father was accepted by Tabuteau. However, my grandfather, who was a dentist and loved medicine, wanted very much for his son to be a doctor. My father told me he just couldn’t go against his father. And so he turned down Curtis to stay in Cleveland and study medicine. Otherwise he would have been a full time student of Tabuteau at Curtis.

He kept up his oboe playing while he was studying medicine, and would sometimes play extra with the Cleveland Orchestra. They only had three in the wind sections at the time. He had studied with oboists in the orchestra, including Philip Kirchner, Tabuteau’s first U.S. student. From 1939-1941 he played principal oboe during the orchestra’s summer season, filling in for Mr. Kirchner, who would leave town for the summer, and he played with the orchestra during the winter season when a fourth player was needed in the section. After five years of studying medicine, he received a doctor’s degree in a branch of physical therapy, mechanotherapy, which uses various techniques to help injuries heal. Some of the techniques he was taught were forerunners of the sports medicine of today.

In October, 1941, he was drafted into the army. His number came up early. He was first stationed in medical units in the South, and then received a transfer to a medical unit at Carlisle Barracks near Harrisburg, PA., where he also played in the band. While he was there he would sometimes take the two-hour train ride from Harrisburg to Philadelphia to hear a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and after one concert he spoke with Mr. Tabuteau and asked if he could have some lessons with him. Tabuteau agreed, and my father traveled to Philadelphia on alternate weeks for several months in 1943 for lessons at his studio. He had about ten lessons. He played Ferling at the lessons.

As Tabuteau’s last student on a Saturday, he would walk with him to his apartment at the Drake, on his way back to the train station. Once when they were walking along he mentioned that he had studied a branch of medicine, and Tabuteau declared that if he practiced medicine and played the oboe on the side: “You will be king of the oboes!”

At one lesson, another oboist in uniform appeared at Tabuteau’s studio. Mr. Tabuteau said: “Is it all right if he listens?” That was John de Lancie.

After his release from the army in late 1945, my father played for George Szell at an informal hearing when he was a guest conductor in Cleveland; when Szell was named as music director shortly afterward, he offered my father the newly created position of assistant principal oboe. He stayed through all of George Szell’s 24 years with the orchestra and beyond, until his retirement in 1977. From time to time he would play principal oboe, including during the orchestra’s 10 ½ week tour to Europe and the former Soviet Union in the spring of 1965, and on the orchestra’s recording of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra, after Marc Lifschey had left the orchestra in January, 1965. With the exception of one summer in the early 1950’s when the Cleveland Orchestra didn’t have a summer season, he never had a position using his medical training.

My Dad passed away in March, 2019 at the age of 101 from complications after falling and breaking his hip. His mind was very sharp to the end, and he was still telling his stories about music, musicians and about his time with the Cleveland Orchestra.

Here’s one of them: Bert Gassman, who studied with Tabuteau in the 1940’s, played with the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1930’s and again in the late 1940’s. When he left Cleveland in 1949 he told George Szell he was going into the family business, the shoe business, but he actually went to play in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Szell called Tabuteau asking for a recommendation for another oboist, and said that Gassman is going into the shoe business. Tabuteau replied: “Ah, a promotion!”

With best regards and thanks for this wonderful website,

Marilyn Zupnik