Painting Bassoons

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I did an experiment on a bassoon recently, I painted it! In the beginning of the quarantine I bought a plastic tenoroon from China, it plays well for what it is. I thought I would use it more in arrangements but then it would make the arrangement less accessible for people without a mini bassoon.

I painted it with a matte lilac spray paint and it came out great, so I decided to do my Linton bassoon also. My Linton sits in my closet now that I don’t teach, and I use it for outdoor evening gigs. For the Linton I used a darker lilac satin spray paint and the resulting finish has a bit more shine to it.

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John Steinmetz wrote Four Signs in 2014 and I was lucky enough to attend the SF Premier with Steve Braunstein and Steve Paulson.

This duet is special because the second bassoon part switches to contra in movements 2 & 4. John also uses a technique in the first movement where the 2 lines cross each other alternating notes, this effect doesn’t come through clearly in the recording but in a live concert hall it creates a really satisfying sound.

Buy the duet at www.trevcomusic.com

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Last month I received my Bell bassoon! I had ordered it in fall of 2019 and Benson gave me the heads up that it was almost finished in February. I am VERY slow to learn new equipment and it takes me forever to get the muscle memory of new shaped keys into my technique. My experience with the new horn so far had been great and I have been playing it exclusively since it arrived. Now I wanted to play them both back and forth to get some sound/resonance comparisons. I found this really confusing because the keys are in different locations and so my Heckel playing suffered, but I think from the video you can get the sense of the differences. The playing experience is quite different, I can only really explain the Bell as being more “juicy” and the Heckel as “dry” I still have a lot of work to do to figure out the Bell further!

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“Largo al factotum” from the Barber of Seville, this is one of the six arias from the opera that have been set as a bassoon duet. The first time I played this was at a fiend’s bassoon recital. This is a flashy aria, but the others are more lyrical and all of them are comical!

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Erlkönig is a popular piece of voice repertoire that gets performed often in conservatories. So I remember hearing this at friends’ recitals when I was in school.

The piece is the setting of poetry of the same name by Goethe. It describes a Father and Son riding through the woods at night on horseback, being followed by Erlkönig (Elf King). The Father can’t see Erlkönig and eventually the son is killed. Schubert’s setting of this is clever in that he uses different ranges in the voice to represent the characters. So one single singer portrays all of parts.

My bassoon arrangement has the two middle bassoon parts do the heavy lifting by playing constant triplets. It makes for a good articulation exercise!

PDF of the score and parts is here Erlkonig Bassoons

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One of my chamber groups, Keyed Kontraptions has started the season. This season is different due to the Covid outbreak, and so we have moved everything online. We are going to be releasing videos and online concerts performances in the next few months.

We are starting with a favorite piece of ours which is titled ‘Tapas’ by Marc Mellits. This is an eight movement work which is completely modular. The movements can be played in any order or just a few of them can be selected. This is a great way to build a program since we can use movements of this as an opening piece or as the closer. This piece was originally a string quartet which Marc arranged for soprano sax, clarinet, and bassoon trio.

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Here is an arrangement of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide Overture.

I had the opportunity to play a run of the entire prediction a few years ago. It was a reduced version and from my vantage point in the pit I could watch the whole show as it was going on, so I had a lot of fun. Throughout the comic operetta the characters individually going through harrowing ordeals that end up turning out for the better, with each of them better off than they began. The over arching message of the show is “We live in the best of all possible worlds”

PDF to the Score is here Candide Bassoons