Bassoon Concertos

This is a very nice recording of bassoon concertos by the Mozart of Paris, Francois Devienne. Eckart Huebner is a masterful player with a nice sound, good interpretation, great intonation, and brings out the musicality which occasionally lacks or is absent in Devienne recordings. His notes are well written and provide background with thoughts and conjecture concerning each of the concertos and the mysterious 2nd bassoon concerto of Mozart which has been attributed to Devienne.

A generously-filled programme featuring 17 of Vivaldi's 39 Bassoon Concertos in which the distinguished bassoonist Klaus Thunemann is partnered with one of the great baroque music ensembles, I Musici.Vivaldi's 39 bassoon concertos (two are incomplete) are at the cornerstone of the bassoon repertory and in the context of Vivaldi's output constitute the greatest number of concertos for a single solo instrument after his 200+ solo violin concertos.

Mozart’s sole bassoon concerto dates from 1774. As the booklet points out, every bassoonist plays it at some time, and most seem to harbour an ambition to record it. I have come to regard the results as a very special test of a player’s musicianship. A technically proficient but dull performance will leave you wondering why you bothered to spend a quarter of an hour with such tedious music, whereas in the hands of a player with real imagination and energy it can be a most exhilarating experience.

It would be no exaggeration to name Antonio Vivaldi as the “pioneer of the bassoon concerto”. The first milestone in the emancipation of the bassoon, until the beginning of the 17 century exclusively used as a basso continuo instrument, for which the part wasn’t even written out, was a series of nine virtuoso bassoon sonatas published by Giovanni Antonio Bertoli in 1645.

Canadian bassoonist George Zukerman is an artiste , a man whose agile command of this difficult instrument is apparent at his first entry in the Mozart concerto. His technique dazzles and his wonderfully sweet and lyrical tone is a perfect match for the cantabile style of the slow movements. Jörg Faerber and the Württemberg Chamber Orchestra have been around for years, and even though the period-instrument movement has encroached upon much of their turf, the 30-year-old-plus playing isn’t dated and can stand comparison with the best now available.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) is one of the 'giants' of Venetian musicians. Surprisingly, while he was recognized as an exceptionally talented violinist, he studied for the priesthood and was ordained in 1703! One of the high points of his career was his long (though intermittent), association with the Ospedale della Pieta, the orphanage for girls which had a tradition of fine musical training of the girls, which Vivaldi undertook most successfully, first as violin master, then in other capacities. He composed most of his music while working there.

Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major for violin, cello, oboe, and bassoon, Hob. 1/105, is among his most recorded works, and among his most utterly joyful. But it has rarely reached the heights of ebullience achieved in this historical-instrument reading by the small British ensemble Arcangelo and its conductor, Jonathan Cohen. The list of things to be enthusiastic about is long, but it begins with the differentiation of the instruments in the solo passages, with the period oboe and bassoon of Alfredo Bernardini and Peter Whelan, respectively, having the depth of texture to stand up to the brilliant Stradivarius violin and Guarneri cello of Ilya Gringolts (a renowned soloist in his own right) and Nicolas Altstaedt.

Antonio Rosetti (born Anton Rösler c. 1750 - died 1792) was a German musician, initially a liveried double-bass player in a noble's establishment, who became a popular composer in his time. He is all but forgotten now, but it was his Requiem Mass that was played in tribute to Mozart a week after the latter's death. And for a long time he was known for his 'Harmoniemusik,' a form of wind band music popular in German-speaking countries well into the 19th century. He is also given credit for inventing the wind quintet, a form that certainly has took on a life of its own to the present day. Finally, he is remembered for having written numerous horn concerti that are occasionally revived.

The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) and his younger colleague and compatriot Sebastian Fagerlund (b. 1972) have both received international recognition for their masterful treatment of large orchestral forces. This they have demonstrated in purely orchestral as well as in concertante works- Aho has written 26 concertos to date (most of them in his monumental project to compose a concerto for each of the main orchestral instruments), and Fagerlunds concertos for clarinet and for violin have been released by BIS to critical acclaim.