\nVivaldi: Concertos for bassoon
\nIn her professional career, which takes her all over the world as soloist and member of the Vienna Philharmonic, Sophie Dervaux has the good fortune to be surrounded by music in all its aspects. Her great love since childhood, however, has been the music of the Baroque: \u201cI think it\u2019s the greatest of all.\u201d No wonder, then, that the bassoonist had the idea a while ago of expressing her first love on record and making an album of works by great masters of the Baroque from Telemann to Handel. Sophie Dervaux would never have dreamt that the fascinating idea would turn into a project of massive proportions. \u201cSomewhere along the way, this Baroque project turned into a plan to record all Antonio Vivaldi\u2019s bassoon concertos,\u201d she says without false modesty over what she has taken on. She never was one to shrink from challenges, as one can easily attest from her impressive biography. How else could she have climbed so many pinnacles at such a young age \u2013 whether as an instrumentalist or increasingly, of late, on the conductor\u2019s rostrum. Her complete edition of Vivaldi is admittedly, as Sophie Dervaux will confirm, a prospect of Everest: a holy mountain, if you like, surrounded by a mystic aura both for bassoonists and for their audience. It represents the core repertoire of a man who can justly be counted among the most astonishing phenomena of music history.
\nWhat intellectual energy, what heights of inspiration must a composer have to create a body of work like that of Antonio Vivaldi? The sheer number of his works, in particular the instrumental concertos, is greater than many can conceive. In a burst of exceptional ill humour, Igor Stravinsky described his Baroque forerunner as \u201ca dull fellow who could compose the same concerto six hundred times over\u201d. Quite apart from the fact that Stravinsky was rather overstating his case (about 450 concertos by Vivaldi have in fact been handed down to us), other composers are full of praise for the music of the Venetian maestro. Perhaps the greatest admirer of Vivaldi was Johann Sebastian Bach, who during his years at the Weimar court (1708-1717) arranged over 20 of his concertos for harpsichord or organ.
\nAbout 250 of Vivaldi\u2019s concertos, the lion\u2019s share of his output, feature the violin as the solo instrument. This is hardly surprising, given that Vivaldi was one of the star violinists of his time, who liked to show off his talent in performances of his own works. The fact that his next favourite solo instrument is the bassoon is less well known. Vivaldi left us a total of 39 bassoon concertos, thus more \u2013 far more! \u2013 than Mozart wrote for the piano. This figure is all the more surprising when one reflects that at the start of the 18th century, the bassoon was principally used for continuo, that is to say, as an accompanying instrument to which the bass line was assigned. As a matter of fact, it was Vivaldi who freed it from this supporting role and he was the first prominent composer to place it in the spotlight.
\nIf today\u2019s bassoonists claim Vivaldi as \u201ctheir\u201d composer, that is due not only to the Venetian\u2019s ground-breaking work, but also to the quality and originality of his music. \u201cNo matter whether you are auditioning for a position or qualifying for graduation, a Vivaldi concerto is likely to be one of the set pieces,\u201d Sophie Dervaux testifies from personal experience. That naturally applies just as well to international competitions like the prestigious ARD Music Competition, which Sophie Dervaux won in 2013 in part because of her captivating interpretation of Vivaldi\u2019s G major Concerto RV 493 \u2013 proof of her success to date as a musician accompanied by the Baroque composer: \u201cEven as a schoolgirl I played some of his concertos, the first of them at 14, after one year of bassoon lessons.\u201d This early start is evidence of Sophie Dervaux\u2019s instrumental capabilities. At the same time, it demonstrates that if even \u201cbeginners\u201d can make sense of his music, Vivaldi certainly knew just how to approach the bassoon. \u201cWe don\u2019t know if he had mastered the bassoon himself,\u201d says the artist, \u201cbut we do know that he knew exactly how to compose for it.\u201d In the case of Vivaldi, as with Mozart, one essentially needs a degree of musical maturity that even the most gifted artists take many years to acquire, and so if Sophie Dervaux was technically capable of playing individual Vivaldi concertos as a teenager, she is certainly well equipped to embark upon a complete edition of his concertante works for bassoon.
\nAnd she is going to play them on a modern instrument and not on one that corresponds to the bassoon that Vivaldi knew. \u201cMy original idea was to play the repertoire on a Baroque bassoon,\u201d says Sophie Dervaux, \u201cbut in the end I decided against it for the Vivaldi recordings.\u201d She feels more at home with the modern bassoon, even if she is altogether familiar with its predecessor: during her studies at the Conservatoire National Sup\u00e9rieur de Musique in Lyon, Sophie Dervaux engaged intensively with the Baroque bassoon, studied the differences in playing technique, intonation and articulation and acquired so much expertise that she could theoretically have switched to the older instrument, if she had been specifically preparing for an Early Music career. \u201cIt\u2019s not unusual for bassoonists to shift their focus,\u201d she says, \u201cafter all, Baroque music is some of the most important repertoire that we have.\u201d And some of the finest, with the name of Antonio Vivaldi almost always taking first place when it comes to bassoon concertos of the period.
\nWe do not know who he originally composed his concertos for, although we are well aware of the environment in which they were written. He taught the pupils of the legendary Ospedale della Piet\u00e0, one of four charitable institutions in the Venice of those days, which took in orphaned, illegitimate or abandoned girls and offered them a first-rate musical education. It was at this hospice that Antonio Vivaldi began his career as a music teacher soon after his admission to the priesthood in 1703. While he also read Mass at the adjoining church of Santa Maria della Piet\u00e0 \u2013 a daily duty that he was soon obliged to forgo for health reasons \u2013 he primarily gave instruction in the violin and other stringed instruments. Eventually, in 1716, Vivaldi assumed the overall musical direction of the Ospedale, whose orchestra became one of Venice\u2019s principal musical attractions under his command. The girls \u2013 up to 70 of them \u2013 who gave public performances were constantly to be heard in new concertos, supplied by their maestro de\u2019 concerti, who was also a successful opera impresario.
\nThe French writer Charles de Brosses gave his impressions of the female performers after a visit to Venice at the end of the 1730s: \u201cThey play violin, flute, organ, oboe, violoncello, bassoon \u2013 in a word, no instrument is so big as to scare them.\u201d There is general agreement that this judgement also applies to the fearless soloist (or soloists) for whom Vivaldi crafted his bassoon concertos. And otherwise than de Brosses humorously suggested, it is not the size of the instrument that is the greatest challenge. Least of all for a 21st-century bassoonist like Sophie Dervaux. Her principal task, as she sees it, is to appreciate the peculiarities of period instruments with their coarser tone and a construction calling for different fingering and apply that knowledge to the potential of today\u2019s performance practice \u2013 and ultimately to blend with the historically informed sound of the ensemble La Folia, all of whose musicians play on original instruments as a matter of course.
\nHow well the \u201cexperiment\u201d has succeeded was a surprise to the participants themselves, particularly as it was their first joint project. \u201cWe didn\u2019t even have time to give advance public performances of the works we have recorded,\u201d, says Sophie Dervaux. The risk of thinking big at the very start certainly paid off, even if the project took time to come to fruition. Robin Peter M\u00fcller, leader of La Folia, and Sophie Dervaux had met at a festival some years earlier, become firm friends on the spot and just as spontaneously resolved to make music together as soon as they could. The bassoonist, who regularly breaks new ground as an interpreter of contemporary works, saw the encounter as a stroke of luck, particularly as she noticed that they had many things in common. Sophie Dervaux is enthusiastic: \u201cWhat I appreciate in La Folia is the willingness to really seek out art and sometimes go to the limit.\u201d Already immersed in the music of the concertos she is tackling next, she looks forward to the later phases of the Vivaldi complete edition \u2013 with the orchestra slimmed down as before. \u201cThere are eight of us in all,\u201d says the bassoonist, who is very much taken with the overall freedom and flexibility of this formation. The musicians are in perfect harmony, both musically and personally. \u201cThis was the nicest recording I have ever made,\u201d, says Sophie Dervaux. Their enjoyment is audible for all listeners to the album.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vivaldi: Concertos for bassoon In her professional career, which takes her all over the world as soloist and member of the Vienna Philharmonic, Sophie Dervaux has the good fortune to be surrounded by music in all its aspects. Her great love since childhood, however, has been the music of the Baroque: \u201cI think it\u2019s the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1279746,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"dmbid":"1349749","upc":"885470032580","linkfire":"https:\/\/BC.lnk.to\/vivaldibassoon","ean":"","genre":"Klassik","genre2":"Fagott","genre3":"","copyright":"","producer":"","playtime":"4260","date":"2024-03-08","dateend":"2099-12-31","trackamount":"19","discamount":"1","artistsname":"","composer":"Antonio Vivaldi","teammember":["1022;Sophie Dervaux;2100771|1009;Sophie Dervaux;2100771|1033;La Folia Barockorchester;2925903|1010;Antonio Vivaldi;42427"],"teammemberlist":["2100771|2100771|2925903|42427"],"english":"
\nVivaldi: Concertos for bassoon
\nIn her professional career, which takes her all over the world as soloist and member of the Vienna Philharmonic, Sophie Dervaux has the good fortune to be surrounded by music in all its aspects. Her great love since childhood, however, has been the music of the Baroque: \u201cI think it\u2019s the greatest of all.\u201d No wonder, then, that the bassoonist had the idea a while ago of expressing her first love on record and making an album of works by great masters of the Baroque from Telemann to Handel. Sophie Dervaux would never have dreamt that the fascinating idea would turn into a project of massive proportions. \u201cSomewhere along the way, this Baroque project turned into a plan to record all Antonio Vivaldi\u2019s bassoon concertos,\u201d she says without false modesty over what she has taken on. She never was one to shrink from challenges, as one can easily attest from her impressive biography. How else could she have climbed so many pinnacles at such a young age \u2013 whether as an instrumentalist or increasingly, of late, on the conductor\u2019s rostrum. Her complete edition of Vivaldi is admittedly, as Sophie Dervaux will confirm, a prospect of Everest: a holy mountain, if you like, surrounded by a mystic aura both for bassoonists and for their audience. It represents the core repertoire of a man who can justly be counted among the most astonishing phenomena of music history.
\nWhat intellectual energy, what heights of inspiration must a composer have to create a body of work like that of Antonio Vivaldi? The sheer number of his works, in particular the instrumental concertos, is greater than many can conceive. In a burst of exceptional ill humour, Igor Stravinsky described his Baroque forerunner as \u201ca dull fellow who could compose the same concerto six hundred times over\u201d. Quite apart from the fact that Stravinsky was rather overstating his case (about 450 concertos by Vivaldi have in fact been handed down to us), other composers are full of praise for the music of the Venetian maestro. Perhaps the greatest admirer of Vivaldi was Johann Sebastian Bach, who during his years at the Weimar court (1708-1717) arranged over 20 of his concertos for harpsichord or organ.
\nAbout 250 of Vivaldi\u2019s concertos, the lion\u2019s share of his output, feature the violin as the solo instrument. This is hardly surprising, given that Vivaldi was one of the star violinists of his time, who liked to show off his talent in performances of his own works. The fact that his next favourite solo instrument is the bassoon is less well known. Vivaldi left us a total of 39 bassoon concertos, thus more \u2013 far more! \u2013 than Mozart wrote for the piano. This figure is all the more surprising when one reflects that at the start of the 18th century, the bassoon was principally used for continuo, that is to say, as an accompanying instrument to which the bass line was assigned. As a matter of fact, it was Vivaldi who freed it from this supporting role and he was the first prominent composer to place it in the spotlight.
\nIf today\u2019s bassoonists claim Vivaldi as \u201ctheir\u201d composer, that is due not only to the Venetian\u2019s ground-breaking work, but also to the quality and originality of his music. \u201cNo matter whether you are auditioning for a position or qualifying for graduation, a Vivaldi concerto is likely to be one of the set pieces,\u201d Sophie Dervaux testifies from personal experience. That naturally applies just as well to international competitions like the prestigious ARD Music Competition, which Sophie Dervaux won in 2013 in part because of her captivating interpretation of Vivaldi\u2019s G major Concerto RV 493 \u2013 proof of her success to date as a musician accompanied by the Baroque composer: \u201cEven as a schoolgirl I played some of his concertos, the first of them at 14, after one year of bassoon lessons.\u201d This early start is evidence of Sophie Dervaux\u2019s instrumental capabilities. At the same time, it demonstrates that if even \u201cbeginners\u201d can make sense of his music, Vivaldi certainly knew just how to approach the bassoon. \u201cWe don\u2019t know if he had mastered the bassoon himself,\u201d says the artist, \u201cbut we do know that he knew exactly how to compose for it.\u201d In the case of Vivaldi, as with Mozart, one essentially needs a degree of musical maturity that even the most gifted artists take many years to acquire, and so if Sophie Dervaux was technically capable of playing individual Vivaldi concertos as a teenager, she is certainly well equipped to embark upon a complete edition of his concertante works for bassoon.
\nAnd she is going to play them on a modern instrument and not on one that corresponds to the bassoon that Vivaldi knew. \u201cMy original idea was to play the repertoire on a Baroque bassoon,\u201d says Sophie Dervaux, \u201cbut in the end I decided against it for the Vivaldi recordings.\u201d She feels more at home with the modern bassoon, even if she is altogether familiar with its predecessor: during her studies at the Conservatoire National Sup\u00e9rieur de Musique in Lyon, Sophie Dervaux engaged intensively with the Baroque bassoon, studied the differences in playing technique, intonation and articulation and acquired so much expertise that she could theoretically have switched to the older instrument, if she had been specifically preparing for an Early Music career. \u201cIt\u2019s not unusual for bassoonists to shift their focus,\u201d she says, \u201cafter all, Baroque music is some of the most important repertoire that we have.\u201d And some of the finest, with the name of Antonio Vivaldi almost always taking first place when it comes to bassoon concertos of the period.
\nWe do not know who he originally composed his concertos for, although we are well aware of the environment in which they were written. He taught the pupils of the legendary Ospedale della Piet\u00e0, one of four charitable institutions in the Venice of those days, which took in orphaned, illegitimate or abandoned girls and offered them a first-rate musical education. It was at this hospice that Antonio Vivaldi began his career as a music teacher soon after his admission to the priesthood in 1703. While he also read Mass at the adjoining church of Santa Maria della Piet\u00e0 \u2013 a daily duty that he was soon obliged to forgo for health reasons \u2013 he primarily gave instruction in the violin and other stringed instruments. Eventually, in 1716, Vivaldi assumed the overall musical direction of the Ospedale, whose orchestra became one of Venice\u2019s principal musical attractions under his command. The girls \u2013 up to 70 of them \u2013 who gave public performances were constantly to be heard in new concertos, supplied by their maestro de\u2019 concerti, who was also a successful opera impresario.
\nThe French writer Charles de Brosses gave his impressions of the female performers after a visit to Venice at the end of the 1730s: \u201cThey play violin, flute, organ, oboe, violoncello, bassoon \u2013 in a word, no instrument is so big as to scare them.\u201d There is general agreement that this judgement also applies to the fearless soloist (or soloists) for whom Vivaldi crafted his bassoon concertos. And otherwise than de Brosses humorously suggested, it is not the size of the instrument that is the greatest challenge. Least of all for a 21st-century bassoonist like Sophie Dervaux. Her principal task, as she sees it, is to appreciate the peculiarities of period instruments with their coarser tone and a construction calling for different fingering and apply that knowledge to the potential of today\u2019s performance practice \u2013 and ultimately to blend with the historically informed sound of the ensemble La Folia, all of whose musicians play on original instruments as a matter of course.
\nHow well the \u201cexperiment\u201d has succeeded was a surprise to the participants themselves, particularly as it was their first joint project. \u201cWe didn\u2019t even have time to give advance public performances of the works we have recorded,\u201d, says Sophie Dervaux. The risk of thinking big at the very start certainly paid off, even if the project took time to come to fruition. Robin Peter M\u00fcller, leader of La Folia, and Sophie Dervaux had met at a festival some years earlier, become firm friends on the spot and just as spontaneously resolved to make music together as soon as they could. The bassoonist, who regularly breaks new ground as an interpreter of contemporary works, saw the encounter as a stroke of luck, particularly as she noticed that they had many things in common. Sophie Dervaux is enthusiastic: \u201cWhat I appreciate in La Folia is the willingness to really seek out art and sometimes go to the limit.\u201d Already immersed in the music of the concertos she is tackling next, she looks forward to the later phases of the Vivaldi complete edition \u2013 with the orchestra slimmed down as before. \u201cThere are eight of us in all,\u201d says the bassoonist, who is very much taken with the overall freedom and flexibility of this formation. The musicians are in perfect harmony, both musically and personally. \u201cThis was the nicest recording I have ever made,\u201d, says Sophie Dervaux. Their enjoyment is audible for all listeners to the album.","imageage":[],"spotify_checked":["16QYijlbHvpVfSq8hbb0Fm"],"age":[""],"playlist":[""],"alt_text":"","topics":[null],"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,156,20],"dmb-topic-category":[],"class_list":["post-1263319","album","type-album","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-album","category-fagott","category-klassik","post-wrapper","thrv_wrapper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/album\/1263319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/album"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/album"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1263319"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/album\/1263319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1267365,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/album\/1263319\/revisions\/1267365"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1279746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1263319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1263319"},{"taxonomy":"dmb-topic-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berlin-classics-music.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dmb-topic-category?post=1263319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}