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Music open thread: Double bass concertos [1]

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Date: 2025-09-16

Thousands of Jews were murdered at Babi Yar in September 1941. Babi Yar is located near Kyiv, at the time the capital of the Soviet Republic of Ukraine. It was hardly the first pogrom in the Soviet Union, and certainly not the last. The Soviet Union refused to acknowledge the massacre until a half century later.

Many Soviet Jews managed to escape the horrors of the pogroms. Double bass virtuoso Serge Koussevitzky, for example, made his way to France in 1920. His baptism as a Christian might not have shielded him from anti-Semitic violence in the Soviet Union, nor in Europe during World War II, for that matter.

Also a brilliant conductor, Koussevitzky emigrated to the United States in 1924 to succeed Pierre Monteux as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. It used to be that people came to the United States to flee Nazism.

The double bass is one of those instruments that you notice more when it’s absent than when it’s present. In most orchestral music, you’d be hard pressed to focus your ears on what the double basses are playing, even if you see eight of them on the stage.

But omit them, and the bass line will sound weak. Many instrument makers have tried to make bass wind instruments for use in wind bands, but none have proven as effective as simply admitting the string bass into the wind band.

Most of the time in the orchestral repertoire, the basses are given the exact same part as the cellos, even though the double bass has a range roughly an octave lower than the cello.

The double bass is a transposing instrument, but most composers who insist on writing every instrument at actual pitch grant themselves an allowance to transpose the basses an octave up, and maybe also likewise for the piccolo (but down instead of up, of course).

In The Technique of Orchestration, Kent Kennan recommends sometimes giving the basses a simplified version “of what the cellos—and possibly the lower woodwinds—are playing,” and omitting them altogether “if the passage at hand seems unsuited to their technique” (p. 28 in the Fourth Edition, 1990).

Kennan gives as an example of this a passage in Schubert’s Symphony in B minor (nicknamed “the Unfinished,” as if it were the only one Schubert decided to leave incomplete) in which the cellos play a G major melody, but the basses just play a quarter note on each downbeat.

And the most dramatic example of this I could find in a sort of random and unscientific sample was in Richard Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie, “Eintritt in den Wald,” which starts out with most of the strings playing a wallpaper pattern of quadruple stops, but the basses play a pedal point of several measures, drop out for a few and then rejoin to briefly double the cellos on a soaring melody before getting back on pedal point duty. It goes on like that for a few more pages.

This does not paint a picture of the sort of agility expected of a solo instrument in a concerto. And yet, composers from the Baroque to the present day have made the double bass work as a concerto solo instrument. The most recent example I am aware of is the one by bassist Kebra-Seyoun Charles, a talented musician many would write off if they don’t see him play.

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I had somehow managed to both know about Serge Koussevitzky’s Double Bass Concerto, Opus 3, and ignore it at the same time for years. Here’s Luis Cabrera Martin on double bass, accompanied by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Nil Venditti.

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Back in the 18th Century, we have quite a few by Jan Křtitel Vaňhal...

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..at least two by Giovanni Bottessini...

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and at least one by Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (though I haven’t listened to it yet).

Coming back closer to the present day, here’s one by Argentinian bassist and composer Andrés Martín. As far as I know, he’s never played the solo himself in a public concert, or at least I couldn’t find a video of such a performance.

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And so, I have come to the end of this series. I’ll think of some other weekly series, something with a clearly defined beginning and end, that I will not be scheduling for automatic publication.

The open thread question: What is your favorite music with double bass solos?

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