Thomas Stacey sometimes told the story of how, as a boy growing up in Arkansas, an Italian man who had been dead for nearly 80 years changed his life.
He was learning piano from his mother, but when he heard the composer’s music, Gioachino Antonio Rossinihis focus shifted to another instrument and decided to make a career with it.
“I was fascinated by the sound of the oboes on the recording of Rossini’s Ladder Ladder Overture,” Stacey recalled in a 1996 Associated Press interview. “That’s when I knew I wanted to be a musician.”
If the oboe was a somewhat unusual choice for young musicians, Mr. Stacy soon made an even more unconventional choice specializing in the English horn. The English horn is a misleadingly named instrument that is not actually a horn but a double-reed instrument. Alto of the oboe family.
In the decades that followed, he became one of America’s finest English horn virtuosos. He has performed with the New York Philharmonic for nearly 40 years, appeared as a guest soloist nationally and internationally, and contributed to countless recordings. Many composers have written works specifically for him, and he has become something of an ambassador for his unusual instrument, performing an all-English horn program, leading seminars each summer, and expanding his repertoire. encouraged.
Stacey died on April 30 in hospice care in Southampton, New York. She is 84 years old. His son Burton Stacy said he died of heart failure.
Mr. Stacey was also an expert on the oboe d’amore, a baroque-era instrument with a mezzo-soprano range. In some recitals he alternated between English horn, oboe d’amore and traditional oboe. Critics praised his tone and dexterity, no matter what he was playing.
John Henken, recalling a 1988 recital at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reseda, California, wrote, “Comfortable melancholy is the specialty of the English horn orchestra,” with Stacey also playing two other instruments. said. “But Stacey demonstrated a much wider range of expressions and sounds. It was supported by a roaring sound.”
As for why she chose the English horn as her main instrument, Stacey’s answer was simple.
“It most closely resembles the human voice and has the most expressive potential in its range of expressiveness than any other instrument,” he said in a 1996 interview.
Thomas Jefferson Stacy was born on August 15, 1938 in Little Rock, Ark. His father, named Thomas, was a farmer and cotton broker, and his mother, Nora Lee (Condit) Stacey, was a homemaker and church organist.
He grew up in Augusta, Arkansas, a small city northeast of Little Rock, and began his musical training with piano, violin and clarinet before settling on the oboe and then focusing on the English horn. When he was 14, he sold his bike to buy a new one.
“It wasn’t a Harley or anything,” he told The New York Times in 1999. “It was just a small, light motorcycle.”
He was largely self-taught to play the oboe and English horn using fingering books. He was 17 and still in his senior year of high school when the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York awarded him a full scholarship.
“I started oboe on Eastman,” he said. “But in some playing groups I also played the English horn. It was already my favourite. It fits my musical persona like a glove.”
While at Eastman, he met classmate Marie Elizabeth Mann. The two were married in 1960, the same year they graduated and Stacey joined the New Orleans Philharmonic. He then performed with the San Antonio Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra before joining the New York Philharmonic in 1972.
He has performed with the Philharmonic Orchestra over 70 times as a soloist. set off By then, many works had been written specifically with him in mind, including Ned Rorem’s Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, which had its world premiere at Manhattan’s Avery Fisher Hall in 1994. A performance in The Times found some of his work to be “strangely fragmented and unfocused”. But he added: Stacey combined these different impressions with a rich tone and great technique. ”
In addition to his wife and son Burton, Stacey, who lived in Hampton Bay, New York, has another son, Philip, and two grandchildren.
In a 1996 interview, Stacey talked about how a talented musician like him kept his edge.
“The better you are, the harder it is to improve,” he said. It’s like hitting a golf ball onto the green with an 8 iron. To hear the sounds well, you have to practice the beginnings and endings of the sounds. ”
