Date: Sun, 02 Jan 2005 15:33:11 -0600
From: jim
Subject: [CB] bassoon blues
Can anyone point me to a recording of the blues played on
bassoon? Not sorta kinda the blues, but something amazing.
Jim
---------------------------------------------------------
Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:27:36 +0100
Subject: Re: [CB] bassoon blues
From: Klaus Bjerre
> Can anyone point me to a recording of the blues played on
bassoon? Not
> sorta kinda the blues, but something amazing.
>
> Jim
Probably way off from the kernel of your request, yet this is
some of the most bluesy bassoon playing I have heard:
Some British movie, 30 or 40 years old, had Peter Ustinov
playing the lead as a gentlemanlike crook.
The main theme, also used as the Leitmotiv of the lead role. It
was presented in a setting for 4-part bassoons. I don't remember all of
the theme, but a re-singing of the remembered fraction has the harmony
moving up a fourth in the fifth bar, which does not diminish my blues
suspicions.
>From an even dimmer corner of my memory I seem to remember
one more City of London based movie with the same lead person and a
similar Leitmotiv in the same 4
bassoons-imitating-a-big-band-sax-section-type-of-setting.
Somehow the bassoon has become involved with paunchy elderly
males frequenting the British judicial system on either side of the bar.
Sir Peter was inimitable even when doing his imitated lectures
on baroque music styles singing the BC bass lines with all the quirks
of a backhandedly played viola da gamba allegedly being a professor
from the music academy in Detmold (in Lower Saxony I think).
However my heart had a much stronger report with Leo McKern
performing as Rumpole the attorney never achieving anything but for the
guaranteed acquittal of his clients. Again the Leitmotiv was carried in
the most bassoonely way, only my ears refuse to remember the number of
bassoons in the setting.
Good bassoons are a most wonderful experience. Until you have to
pay for them. And here I am speaking of the instruments only, not the
instrumentalists.
Klaus
***End of Contrabass Digest***