THEVIRTUOSO WORKSPROUD FOR BAROQUE BASSOON BASSOON AND CONTINUO PETER WHELAN & ENSEMBLE MARSYAS ANONYMOUS JOHANN FRIEDRICH FASCh (1688 - 1758) Les Gentils Airs - ou Airs Connus, Sonata in C Major for bassoon ajustée en duo, pour basson seul and continuo, FaWV N:C 1 accompagné d’un clavecin 8. Largo 2:54 1. Les Sauvages 9. Allegro 2:27 (arr. Jean-Philippe Rameau) 2:08 10. Andante 2:34 2. La Furstemberg 4:46 11. Allegro Assai 2:52 3. Tamborin (arr. Jean-Philippe Rameau) 1:16 FRANÇOIS COUPERIn (1668 - 1733) Les goûts-réunis, ou Noveaux concerts: JOSEPH BODIN DE BOISMORTIER Treizième Concert (1689 - 1755) 12. Vivement 1:04 Sonata in G Major for bassoon 13. Air Agréablement 2:47 and continuo, Op. 50 No. 2 14. Sarabande Tendrement 2:09 4. Largo 3:00 15. Chaconne Legére 2:35 5. Allemanda: Allegro 2:45 6. Largo 2:10 GEORG PHILIpp TELEMANN 7. Giga 2:18 (1681 - 1767) Sonata in F minor, TWV 41:f1 16. Triste 2:23 17. Allegro 4:24 18. Andante 1:41 19. Vivace 2:31 2 JOSEPH BODIN DE BOISMORTIER Recorded at (1689 - 1755) WIGMORE HALL, LONDON, UK Sonata in E minor for bassoon FROM 4 – 6 SEptEMBER 2012 and continuo, Op. 50 No. 1 20. Andante-Staccato 1:35 Produced and recorded by 21. Allemanda: Allegro 2:21 PHILIP HObbS 22. Aria: Affetvos 2:41 23. Gavotta: Presto 1:58 Assistant engineering by ROBERT CAMMIDGE MAttHEW DUBOURG (1707 - 1767) 24. Eileen Aroon with variations Post-production by set by Mr. Dubourg 2:28 JULIA THOMAS Total Running Time: 60 minutes Cover image PETER JAKOB HOREMANS’ BILDNIS DES HOFMUSIKUS ‘FELIX REINER MIT FAGOtt’ Courtesy of INSTRUMENTS BLAUEL/GNAMM (ARTOTHEK) Bassoon, after Prudent Thierrot - Paris c.1770, Peter De Koningh, Design by Netherlands 1994. GMTOUCARI.COM Cello, Thomas Smith, London c.1740. Theorbo, Giuseppe Tumiatti 1998. Harpsichord, after Mietke - Berlin c.1710, Bruce Kennedy, Italy 1991. With grateful thanks to Dunedin Consort. Pitch a’ 415 Silbermann II 3 What does the bassoon have to be proud of? After all, isn’t it the clown of the orchestra? It is too easy for caricatures like the goofy lumbering theme in Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the grandfather in Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf to override the more serious aspects of the bassoon’s musical persona. These images colour our perception of the eighteenth-century bassoon, which had every right to claim the epithet ‘proud’. The variety of bassoon precursors that existed at the end of the Renaissance elicited a lexicon of names: curtal, dulcian, bajón, basson, fagott. The last may refer to the instrument’s physical construction that made it look like a bundle of sticks, an etymology that appeared as early as 1636 before the appearance of earliest reported true bassoon made in four pieces where the image makes more sense. That instrument arrived on the scene in France sometime in the 1670s, likely a product of the famous Hotteterre dynasty of woodwind players and builders that was also responsible for creating the Baroque oboe from its ancestor the shawm shortly before. The instrument they designed had a strong resonant low register, making it ideal to reinforce the bass line, but the tenor and upper registers remained the terrain of the virtuoso for some time. Still, this made it ideally suited to providing bass lines, and its doubled-back bore meant that it was more compact and portable than the hefty bass shawm pommers. At first the bassoon marched alongside oboes in bands to rouse troops to battle, served as the king’s official alarm clock at his levée, or in rustic contexts, it often imitated the bagpipe bourdon. The Dulcian had a rich solo repertoire but even after the Baroque bassoon arrived in its definitive form, it still took some time to assert its pride of place in musical ensembles. More than anything, it had to challenge the long-standing assessment of wind instruments as less noble than strings, and inferior in their expressive capabilities. Like the mythical Marsyas who had the temerity to challenge Apollo to a competition between his rustic aulos pipes and the refined lyre, bassoonists were not always given the same opportunities as other instrumentalists and had to struggle to assert their individual voice 4 but emerged if not the victors, the proud equals to their competitors. Like the other woodwinds developed at the court of Louis XIV just prior to the establishment of Lully’s Académie Royale de Musique (known commonly as the Opéra), the bassoon was also developed to be part of the orquestre. That meant that it not only played in double reed consorts, but needed to be able to play in tune with and blend with other instruments. Gradually its unique tonal characteristics were used to add colour to the other sections of the orchestra. Bassoonists found work outside France in the company of Hautboisten bands, one of the most important cultural status symbols of the time. Already in the 1670s and 1680s oboe bands were resident in Württemburg and Hamburg. Early on, the talents of the better bassoonists were utilised in aria obbligatos for one or two bassoons, some of the instrument’s earliest solo repertoire. As players and makers began to further explore the instrument’s potential, its range was extended upwards. It was the Hamburg composer and music commentator Johann Mattheson who dubbed the bassoon ‘proud,’ and wrote in 1713 that ‘anyone who wishes to distinguish himself on the Proud Bassoon will find that elegance and speed especially in the high register will tax his powers to the full.’ This implies that fluency in the upper register continued to be a challenge, but if the new bassoon music is anything to go by, it was a challenge soon met by the finest of players. With this new capability, resulting partly from design modifications, and partly from adjustments to reed making, the bassoon was called on to supply inner harmonies and counter melodies and, in the hands of an astute master, was now able to match the haute-contre — the proud high tenor hero of French opera. As today, the bassoon was not nearly as common as other instruments, like the flute, violin or oboe, or for that matter its string counterpart the cello. It is hard to deny that, when it comes to repertoire, the bassoon has always been less well off than practically any other instrument. This is partly because it took some time for its personality to take shape from its 5 disparate registral components: the strong, manly, sometimes gruff lowest register, the rich middle, and strained but potentially lyrical upper reaches. If the bassoon’s multifarious character were not enough, the lexicon of names applied to it made for an identity crisis. Today fagott and basson are used to distinguish the two main branches of modern instruments. The German fagott and French basson developed in parallel over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, each with distinctive physical forms as well as associated playing techniques, reeds and approaches. But the terms existed before there was a clear national distinction. Bach used both words in different contexts. Most of the bassoon parts written in Weimar are labelled ‘bassono’ and are notated higher than the other instruments. In his later music he more frequently used the designation ‘fagotto’ notating the part at the same pitch as the other orchestral instruments. This suggests that for Bach bassono could have been a lower-pitched (probably French) instrument and the fagotto was a dulcian at Chorton. But in terms of treatment, there is little to distinguish in the energetic agile filigree that he gave both fagotto and bassono. Other composers used the same terms, but were apparently less discriminating. The manuscript of the sonata by Fasch on this recording, likely composed when Bach was already established in Leipzig, gives ‘fagotto solo’ and ‘bason’ for the accompanying bass line — an indication of different instruments, or simply the recognition of separate functions? The 1710s and 1720s saw a flowering in the art of bassoon playing. In Dresden musical tastes were turning to Vivaldi for inspiration. His plethora of bassoon concertos and chamber works with bassoon set the tone for Jan Dismas Zelenka’s astounding Trio Sonatas where the bassoonist takes on an increasingly independent role. While in the first couple of sonatas it still supplies the bass to the virtuosic oboe parts, across the set of six sonatas, Zelenka gave the bassoon progressively more elaborated parts that vie with the oboes for the virtuosic limelight. Johann Friedrich Fasch, who was appointed Kapellmeister in Zerbst in 1722, visited Dresden five years later and wrote sacred and instrumental 6 music for the famous Hofkapelle orchestra, so he was doubtless familiar with Zelenka’s music and the bassoon playing there. Fasch’s chamber music also includes numerous works with demanding bassoon parts, but his only bassoon sonata dates from the end of the 1720s and may compete with Telemann’s Sonata in F minor, TWV 41:f1 as being the earliest sonata specifying bassoon as the solo instrument, although Telemann’s is certainly the first to appear in print. Telemann published his Sonata in instalments in his weekly music periodical Der Getreue Musikmeister (The Faithful Music Master), begging patience from subscribers to wait for four issues to build up the entire work (even the two parts of the second movement were printed in successive issues). Most of the music in this periodical seems to have been intended for domestic music making by amateurs, and we may well ask how many subscribers there would have been with the requisite skills for this work.