Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the July 27th "Minneapolis Sunday Tribune." We are happy to reprint it here.

History may be made on the stage of Orchestra Hall this week. Rhadames Angelucci, the Minnesota Orchestra's principal oboist, may actually walk to his seat from the stage-left door, not from the right side, which he has done since Orchestra Hall opened.

Even now, tension is mounting, bets are being placed. Which will it be? Door No. 1 or Door No. 2?

It's an old show-biz superstition--always enter the stage from the side closer to the street--and one breaks such a pattern at no small risk to life and limb. But then the Thursday-night concert is a momentous occasion: Angelucci's last performance at Orchestra Hall as principal oboist after 44 years with the orchestra, the longest continuous service of any player in the orchestra's history.

He won't, in fact, officially retire that night. There will be a few run-outs with the orchestra yet to play, after which, next month, the orchestra will join Neville Marriner for a week at the Meadowbrook Festival in Michigan. Angelucci will be there in his seat at Meadowbrook, as always, a little early and, as always, worrying about his reeds.

Still, it's safe to say that this week marks the end of the orchestra's Angelucci Era. It was in 1936 that the 21-year-old Angelucci, fresh from the Curtis Institute in his hometown of Philadelphia, stepped off the train in Minneapolis to start a new life. He had been auditioned by Eugene Ormandy just after Ormandy had made a move in the opposite direction, from conductor in Minneapolis to conductor in Philadelphia; since the then Minneapolis Symphony was temporarily without a music director (Dmitri Mitropoulos wouldn't come aboard for another year), Ormandy agreed to audition the post.

And it wasn't that Angelucci planned to stay on forever in Minneapolis. Young he was, but he had been a professional player since the age of 13, worrying about his reeds even then. He had played chamber and symphonic music. He had played opera in the pit in Atlantic City--the entire score played by 11 musicians, the pianist covering all the brass parts. You learn a lot about opera in such situations. And with the other Angelucci brothers, all musicians, he had played jazz with the late Joe Venuti.

He was an experienced player who knew his stuff, in other words. This was not chopped liver stepping off the train in Minneapolis. But in those days musicians moved from orchestra to orchestra much more than is the case today. He'll take the job, he figured, and see what happens.

What happened was Angelucci liked Minneapolis. He had offers over the years to go elsewhere, big ones, too. But he always asked for a lot of money, more than he thought they would be willing to pay. That way he didn't have to make the decision himself. Plus, he was settling down here. He married Betty Maddy, daughter of former orchestra violinist Harry Made, and started raising a family.

Mitropoulos named his first oboe, and so he stayed on through the reigns of Antal Dorati and Stanislaw Skrowaczewski and now, Neville Marriner. To say nothing of all the guest conductors that have passed this way over the years: Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Pierre Monteux, even the stern-visaged composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who proved to be not so stern in a rehearsal that Angelucci remembers.

When the orchestra began to play through the composer's own "Symphonic Dances,"Rachmaninoff sat at the edge of the stage listening and soon began to cry. "Cried like a baby," Angelucci said. On an earlier occasion, Rachmaninoff was conducting a rehearsal. Angelucci hit a wrong note. "F-sharp," the composer said, and winked at him. "Such a warm man," said Angelucci. "I'm just wondering if they make them like that anymore."

It might just as readily be asked whether they make players like Angelucci anymore. Emotion, individuality--these are qualities that seem to have been prized more among players (and their teachers) of an earlier era than is common today.

It was prized certainly by Marcel Tabuteau, Angelucci's teacher at Curtis and teacher of many great oboists of several generations in this country. What Leopold Auer was for the violin in Russia, surely Tabuteau was in America for the oboe. It's what Angelucci calls the "lush" school of oboe playing.

"My teacher used to say to me, 'I could teach a jackass to move the fingers, but how about this,'" Angelucci said, gesturing at his heart. "He always said, 'Do it your way, the way you feel it,' and I think that's the only way. You know, l never went by recordings. I've had students that learn that way, and it's abominable what you have to do with them. If I try to tell them something, they say, 'That's not the way it sounds on the recording.' I say, "Well then, listen to the recording and learn to play. Don't come to me."

As he spoke one afternoon recently, Angelucci was seated in the green room at Orchestra Hall. It was a day off for him, but he had to come in anyway to pick up his paycheck, which, naturally, is a bit larger than it was in 1936. It was a 26-week season back then, and his salary was $75 a week.

"I was the richest kid on the campus when I came here," he said, laughing. "I could afford an 85-cent meal, where they could go for only 65 cents. Then I got a raise to $80, and I thought, 'Oh, boy, am I rich.' I went out and bought a beautiful camel's hair coat. When I walked down Nicollet, everybody turned around and looked."

He loved having the summers off in those days, "except that most of us, by the time the following season started in late October, we were borrowing money to get going. Violin players were selling Bibles. That's a fact. "

Angelucci, whose friends call him "Johnny," hardly looks his age: 65. He does have to watch his diet, having undergone heart-bypass surgery four years ago. But this is a healthy seeming man, full of life. Why is he retiring five years before, according to current law, he would have to? He winced slightly, as though he'd thought this one over a good deal.

"I think a person . . . well, doesn't an athlete slow down at a certain point? They say, 'Yeah, he's playing as well as ever.' But there's things about my playing that I 'm unhappy about, that a few years ago were very easy for me to do. Now I have to work harder--fingerings, for example."

Certain oft-repeated repertoire he's gotten tired of, too, he said: "Like the Beethoven 9th. I was never a Beethoven 9th lover. I hope that doesn't . . . I can't help it. To me, it's too long, the slow movement is tedious, it goes on and on. The 'Messiah' is another one. I used to say if any jobber calls me and it's `Messiah' I'd say, 'No, thank you.' "

He also doesn't like the touring and the bad food that usually goes with it.

His older brother, Adelchi, 67, plays second bassoon with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The middle brother, Ernani, 66, a horn player in the Cleveland Orchestra, will retire this season, too.

(By now the opera lovers will have caught on: Two of the brothers were named for Verdi heroes--Rhadames, Aida's lover, and Ernani, the eponymous hero of the early and less often-performed opera. Caruso had just sung Rhadames in Philadelphia, and Angelucci's mother . . . well, it's a long story).

With retirement, Angelucci plans to do some gardening, keep up his avid interest in baseball and also play a lot more chamber music than he had time for previously. It'll be a pleasure, he said, to get away from the routine and pressure of orchestra playing, a pressure that is especially fierce for oboe players.

It has been argued, for example, that oboists tend to be more neurotic than other instrumentalists; they're driven to it by those damn reeds, which are so quirky. (And maybe a bit more superstitious, too. Another Angelucci superstition is that for a performance he always drives to Orchestra Hall by the same route that he did for the rehearsals of that performance.)

Angelucci accepts the generalization. "The reed puts you in a state of neurosis all the time. I'll go home after a concert and look at the reed under a light and say, 'Gee, why didn't the thing play right?' And my wife gets so angry. She says, 'Forget it. The concert's over.' But it's never over for me."

Oboists are always grinding new reeds. A friend of the Angelucci's said she came to their house on New Year's Eve one year, and Angelucci was nowhere to be found. Turns out he was down in the basement grinding reeds--on New Year's Eve.

He's had them break on him during a concert. "Right in the middle of a solo once. There was no sound. Then, of course, you wish that the stage would just open right up."

For security, such as there is, he always has spare reeds with him. Years ago, when the orchestra played the New York premiere of Gunther Schuller's "Seven Studies On Themes of Paul Klee," which has a big oboe solo in it, Angelucci had 20 reeds in his case ready to go. "Like my teacher said, 'It always pays to have something in reserve.' "

An almost fanatically tough critic of his own playing, Angelucci will admit, however, that there are occasions that make it all worth while, as when, for example, during the orchestra's Mideast tour in the late '50s, there was a performance of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony in the Acropolis in Athens. "That's one of the times that the oboes came out right," he said. "That happens about once every 10 years."

It isn't, in other words, that he regrets taking up the oboe. He took to the instrument right away, in fact, when his father, who played horn in the opera and movie houses in and around Philadelphia, gave him one. Angelucci, just 10 at the time, got the smallest instrument; the older brothers got the bassoon and horn.

Soon thereafter, his father took him to a movie house and let him sit in the pit for a performance that his father was playing of the score for the original "Ben Hur" with Francis X. Bushman.

"My dad would take a nap, then wake up and play the horn call for the chariot races, and I thought, 'Jeez, that's thrilling. Imagine, he's sleeping, then wakes up just to play the call.' Of course, he'd been playing it for 26 weeks straight. I thought, 'This is for me.' At home I 'd pick up one of my mother's crochet needles and get some kind of handle, and I 'd pretend I was playing in the pit. Then I'd put the instrument down and take my intermission. Oh, man. Of course, I'd play cowboys and Indians, too."

It may have been inevitable that the Angelucci brothers became musicians. That's the tradition, after all, of South Philly; you become either a musician or a comedian, sometimes a bit of both.

He married into music, too. His wife was concertmistress in the Minneapolis Roosevelt High School orchestra, and, as stated, his father-in-law played in the early days of the Minneapolis Symphony. "God, he was in the symphony with Oberhoffer," Angelucci said, gesturing at the photo of the orchestra's first music director that adorns the green-room wall. "He quit when Verbrugghen came because he couldn't stand Verbrugghen, thought he was a real ham."

Angelucci's three children--Eileen, John and Mary (who have given him, so far, five grandchildren)--are musical but not professionals. Eileen, however, married Lawrence Weinman, who was bass trombonist with the orchestra for 20 years, and Mary married Herb Greenberg, now associate concertmaster in Pittsburgh.

Mitropoulos, among the orchestra's music directors, was Angelucci's favorite. "He never embarrassed you. He always made you feel that you were someone."

"Dorati had that, too, although Dorati was a screamer. But it didn't mean anything. I'll never forget the time we were rehearsing in Northrop. He was given to tantrums. This one day he stormed off the podium and walked offstage, and we heard that big steel door slam. Well, by the time he came back out--he had cooled off--the orchestra was gone. A few days later, he did the same thing. He got up and started to scream and started walking off the stage. As he was going off he said, "I'll be right back. Don't leave."

"Then one time I stormed into his room. I thought he was giving me a dirty look in rehearsal and told him so. He says, 'What's the meaning of this? You know, I'm liable to get angry, too. I consider you one of the greatest in the world. I wasn't looking at you anyway.' I said, 'Oh, that's different.' He was looking at someone else, giving him a dirty look. That was one thing Mitropoulos didn't do, though. You made a mistake, so what?"

Whether Angelucci will miss those stormy episodes when he retires we don't know. He will miss, he said, the kindnesses and the camaraderie shown him by the other players over the years. But then he's not exactly going out to pasture, either. He will keep up his teaching and other activities, as mentioned.

"And you know what I'd like to do?" he said. "You know, when they're playing some of these pop things where a sax gets up and plays out? I'd like to get up sometime and wow them with a really hot chorus on the oboe. I'd love to. I've talked to Dave Karr and some other musicians in town. I say, 'Gee, whiz. How do you guys do it?' I'd like to take lessons."

It could, in other words, be a rather unusual Mahler 1st Symphony that we hear Thursday night.

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