Music: Respectable Rabbit

At 15, it seemed to Reginald Kell that "there must be some easier way out than engineering." So he took up the clarinet. After one day, because he had once studied violin, he could play a couple of tunes. In ten years, he was a professor of clarinet in the Royal Academy of Music, which later made him a Fellow, "a fate I thought reserved only for respectable musicians, like an organist at St. Paul's."

Last week, tall, ruddy Clarinetist Reginald Kell, recognized as one of the world's best, let Manhattan judge his respectability in person for the first time. Snowbound in...