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Music open thread: Bassoon concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-01-27
I've been thinking a lot about Nazi Germany this past week, you probably have been, too. And not just because of Elon Musk having Tourette syndrome, or whatever the excuse was that has been given for his questionable gesture last week.
In Nazi Germany, a lot of Jewish professionals were summarily dismissed from their posts. By 1935, you could not find any Jews teaching at universities. The situation with musicians was a little more nuanced. Jewish musicians were scrolled off to the Jüdischer Kulturbund, while properly Aryan musicians were enrolled in the Reichskammermusik (RMK). An article in Music and the Holocaust explains that
By 1937, the RMK counted among its members tens of thousands of professional musicians and music workers, and under Goebbels a new system of professionalisation of the music world took place. Every musician was assigned to one of five levels, each of which had a set wage. Goebbels also developed many programmes to aid poor and unemployed musicians, which boosted many salaries and careers. Commitment to Nazi ideology, however, tended to be weighed more heavily than musical talent, allowing loyal mediocrity to be rewarded over skill.
Hmm. Nothing like that could ever happen in America, right? Right?
The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler worried about losing the best musicians from his orchestra, the Berliner Philharmoniker.
The only major German figure to offer any sort of public protest was the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, who wrote an open letter to Goebbels. Although he approved of the elimination of ‘Jewish influence’ over German music, he also insisted that there were brilliant individual Jews who should be allowed to continue performing; he worried about filling the positions of some of the best musicians in his orchestra. There were also some more established Jews who were deeply woven into the musical life of Germany and not as easy to summarily fire; several such musicians maintained employment under the Nazis during the initial years of the regime. By the end of 1935, however, the purge was more or less complete. Many German-Jewish musicians had by this point fled Germany, the bulk going to the USA, England, or Palestine.
A lot of Jewish composers came to America, and their compositions are still performed today. As for the Jewish singers and instrumentalists who came over, some of their contributions survive in recordings, some of which have gone out of print and some of which are still commercially available.
Paul Hindemith was not Jewish, but he was unwilling to compromise with the Nazis in any way, unlike Furtwängler. So he eventually came to America and became a U. S. citizen, but then went back to Europe and lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life.
Hindemith was a big believer in the idea that a composer should have firsthand knowledge of playing several different musical instruments, especially the ones that he writes music for. He was apparently very good on viola, but he tried to play every other instrument of the orchestra at least once.
In 1927, Hindemith purchased a bassoon from Wilhelm Heckel GmbH, a family-owned instrument manufacturer best known for the heckelphone. It seems Hindemith did not write a bassoon concerto, but he did write a bassoon sonata. I turn to bassoonist David A. Wells for background on the piece.
Hindemith wrote his Sonate for bassoon in 1938, during a tumultuous time in his life. Performances of his music had been banned in Germany in 1936, and in May 1938 he was one of the composers singled out for scorn at a Nazi exhibit of Entartete (Degenerate) Musik in Düsseldorf. He soon decided to leave Germany, and emigrated to Switzerland in September 1938. [footnote omitted] The premiere of his Sonate for bassoon took place in Zurich on November 6 of that year, performed by bassoonist Gustav Studl and pianist Walter Frey. The concert also included his Sonata for Piano, four hands, performed by Frey and Hindemith himself. [footnote omitted]
Hopefully that has not been an overly long preamble to this open thread, in which I’m covering the instruments one by one each week. So far I’ve gone over the flute, the oboe and the clarinet. Next on this survey, the bassoon.
Antonio Vivaldi actually wrote quite a few bassoon concerti. I have had for years now one CD of Vivaldi’s bassoon concerti in my iTunes collection, with soloist Sergio Azzolini, and it’s clearly not a complete selection, as it’s missing the one in E minor, RV 484.
Actually, all these years I had failed to notice that the CD is Volume 2, and a quick Google search reveals a Volume 5, meaning that there are at least four other volumes of Vivaldi bassoon concerti from Azzolini that I have not listened to yet and which I was completely unaware of.
So now I’m very curious to hear those other volumes, especially for his recording of the E minor. That might be available on YouTube. But for today, I will instead post this performance by Marlene Ngalissamy and the Ontario Pops Orchestra conducted by Carlos Bastidas.
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YouTube surfaced to me this recording of the E minor Concerto, played by Claudia Abramczuk, with Marta Kluczyńska conducting the Karol Szymanowski School of Music Orchestra. I was reluctant to embed two different videos of the same musical composition, but since the soloist and the conductor are both women, I decided to also embed this one.
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Vivaldi’s Bassoon Concerto in A minor, RV 499, is very powerful. Or at least it is in Sergio Azzolini’s album, in which he’s accompanied by L’Aura Soave Cremona conducted by Diego Cantelupi. I was going to embed a performance by Aaron Pergram, but it’s really disappointing compared to Azzolini’s recording, so I’m linking it rather than embedding it.
However, I do have to acknowledge that Pergram plays it a lot better than I ever could. As I’ve mentioned before, I took a basic woodwinds class many years ago and I got to play clarinet, alto saxophone, bassoon and oboe, in that order, if I recall correctly. I did not progress beyond the beginner level on any of those instruments.
I am completely certain that the oboe was the last instrument I played in that class, preceded by the bassoon. I think I had a decent tone for the instrument’s bass clef notes. But middle C, I just couldn’t get it to sound, and I don’t think I even tried any higher notes. At least the instructor allowed for the possibility that maybe the instrument was deficient in some way, and allowed me to move on the oboe, which I played much better than any of the other instruments, including the bassoon.
Supposedly Vivaldi wrote the same concerto nine hundred times. Or four hundred times, or a thousand times, the number doesn’t matter because it’s a myth. Like, listen to this other Vivaldi bassoon concerto that’s also in A minor, RV 498. If Timothée Chalamet ever plays a movie character who plays bassoon, he should call on Theo Plath to help him out.
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Here’s yet another Vivaldi bassoon concerto that’s also in A minor, RV 497, played by Karina Muñoz.
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Sometimes these numbers you see in the titles correspond to when the musicologist knows or believes the composer wrote the piece. In the case of the bassoon concerto by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig Ritter von Köchel knew it was written in 1774, so he gave it number 191, placing it after some variations on a theme by Salieri but before all of his piano sonatas. Later musicologists tweaked the number slightly, to 186e, which still puts the concerto within the bounds I’ve given.
In the case of Peter Ryom with his Ryom Verzeichnis of Vivaldi’s compositions, it seems to me that he just grouped them first by type and then by key within each type. This should not be seen as a criticism, however, since there’s much less contemporary documentation than there is with Salzburg composers like Leopold Mozart and Michael Haydn.
We should therefore not conclude that Vivaldi wrote four bassoon concerti in A minor (RV 496 to RV 500) consecutively after writing two in G minor (RV 494 and RV 495) consecutively and then he moved on to write four in B-flat major (RV 501 to RV 504). Here’s my favorite of the two in G minor.
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Okay, enough Vivaldi for now. I move on, with very little commentary, to Hummel,
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Carl Maria von Weber
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and Rossini.
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Contrabassoon concertos
For a long time, composers and performers wanted an instrument like the bassoon, with a lower range, to be to the bassoon what the double bass is to the cello. Johann Sebastian Bach actually used a contrabassoon in his St. Matthew Passion. And Beethoven used the contrabassoon in his Fifth and Ninth Symphonies.
But the instrument in its original design was rather unwieldy. If I understand the acoustics correctly, making a bassoon-like instrument with a range going an octave lower than the bassoon requires a wind column twice as large as that of the bassoon. So if you think the bassoon is quite big as it is, a contrabassoon would be so large as to be unmanageable.
Then someone had an idea. As it is, the bassoon “folds” the wind column once. The player blows on a double reed attached to a bocal which is attached to one of the three “sticks” that make up the instrument. The air flows downward into the bottom “stick,” more properly called the boot joint, and then upward to the “stick” with the bell of the instrument. These components are separated prior to returning the instrument to its case for storage and travel.
The idea then was that maybe the contrabassoon should “fold” the wind column twice instead of just once. The resulting keywork was such that the instrument that allowing the instrument to be separated into three “sticks” like the bassoon would be a logistical nightmare worse than assembling Ikea furniture.
So the musician is simply not allowed to disassemble the instrument like that. The main disadvantage of this is for the musician, who then needs to carry the instrument around in a much larger case than he or she would need for a bassoon.
I don’t know who had that idea of “folding” the wind column, but it was apparently not enough. Wilhelm Heckel made some subtler improvements to the design which stood for roughly a century.
As far as I can tell, Bruckner never used the contrabassoon, though at least one illegitimate version of one of his symphonies uses it. Gustav Mahler used it a bit more. In general, though, the instrument was only being used to add bass power to the woodwinds, and not really for its own tone.
Lewis Lipnick is a contrabassoonist who has been playing the instrument for longer than I have been alive, and he wanted a concerto for the instrument. Gunther Schuller’s Contrabassoon Concerto of 1978 is apparently not all that interesting to Lipnick. By the way, Schuller was the son of German immigrants.
When Lipnick played in Kalevi Aho’s Ninth Symphony, he was bowled over by that composer and asked him to write a contrabassoon concerto. Aho wrote a piece that actually requires an instrument with a range much wider than that of the bassoon, and which actually includes the bassoon’s upper range, and an American manufacturer stepped up to the challenge. What exactly is the point of a contrabassoon that encompasses the bassoon’s range? It’s interesting music, though, I recommend it.
Lewis Lipnick also plays the one by Daniel Baldwin… and oops, the video has been made private, so I deleted the embed.
I’d like to close this one out on a very light note. The bassoon is a difficult instrument to play well. The piano is also a difficult instrument to play well. And if your accompanist happens to be running late, you might have to take on the added challenge of trying to play both the bassoon and the piano at the same time…
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The open thread question: what’s your favorite music with solos for bassoon or contrabassoon?
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