Wonderful though interacting with Juliette Binoche would quite likely be, I'm afraid I'm just a clarinettist...

The thing is, it's as an orchestral instrument that it's something special and there's no real possibility for the 'non-aligned' to keep that tradition going. (As it happens I found myself listening to the old Orchestre de Paris recording of 'Pierre et le loup' last night - that's another quite wacky experience on basson. As of course is The Sorcerer's Apprentice on the same disc. (EMI compilation called Pour le enfants - might still be a few at HMV...)

Market-driven period instrument realities - I was thinking of various occasions in the last couple of decades when it's become perfectly clear that standard practice in the period-performance market is different in important ways from how things were but things potter on the same way regardless. Hand-horns in Baroque music, intonation holes on 'natural' trumpets (I've seen performances where the trumpeter's fingers were almost as busy as the oboists'!), choirs as the basic vocal group in Bach cantatas, always having string instruments in the 16' register, standardisation of pitch-levels and temperaments (and, yes, repertoire)...  and of course the fundamental problem of performing the music much louder than it ever was just so enough punters can hear it to make it financially worthwhile, even though it means flattening out the timbres which are the whole point of using the old instruments nowadays.

Er, Reiner, are you sure you don't mean bakelite? (Haven't we been here before?) I have a feeling bauxite is aluminium ore. Of course if your flauto dolce is made of that,

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Thing is, though - OK, one sort of expects a full-on orchestra like you've described to have dodgy balance. What one doesn't always expect is something like what I saw in Basel a couple of weeks ago. Bach cantatas with solo voices (fine) and more or less the appropriate number of very well-played period instruments (also fine) but a bassoon playing so loud that it buzzes through the tutti, the voices standing back just far enough in the ensemble to make things tricky, a double bass all the way down to contra D and trumpets (with intonation holes of course) hooning through everything. Someone's going to look at that setup, not hear the voices (as I didn't, most of the time, and I had a damn good seat), shrug their shoulders and think, well, if that's what Bach actually had I don't think much of it. But the things which differentiate it from what Bach really did have make all the more difference to the balance because the ensemble is so small; and they're the kind of things we sweep under the carpet because, well let's face it, get real, who wants to try to play Brandenburg 2 on a trumpet without intonation holes?

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Er, yes, sorry, got a bit soapboxy there.

Anyway. For a limited time only: Pierre et le loup on sendspace with a real live basson. It's 25MB so if you're on dialup, good luck.

Damn. And I thought I'd just learned an astounding new fact about recorder manufacture 

Golly, it's an entirely different instrument, isn't it?   Like a grown-up curtal (except in-tune)

And, errr, P Ustinov in French, all at no additional cost?   What finer way could there be to spend a Friday evening? (don't answer that one...)

Although 200g of caviar kindly gifted by friends just back from Kamchatka add further sparkle to the Torheitabend

The question of "historical" bassoons has already cropped up here...

... considering that many/most players of the baroque bassoon also play the modern fagott for a living too...

... how hard would it really be for fagottists to double on the basson too?   In addition to issues of pleasantness of timbre etc, surely there is ultimately an issue here of that judgemental and thorn-ensnared word....   "authenticity"? 

Although maybe it's unfair to expect the bassoonists to shell-out on instruments, and the time to learn them, whilst not also asking the trombonists to bring "peashooter" instruments and G-basses,  the trumpeters to leave their trumpets and bring cornets-a-pistons?

As a sometime cornet-player myself, the timbre is just as different as the basson is from the fagott...

The first LP I ever owned was a collection of the usual French suspects - Boléro, L'après-midi, España, etc. - by the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne conducted by Pierre Dervaux. It must have been made in the late 1950s, or at the latest 1960, because I was 10 when I bought it. Despite the fact that Amazon.com believes that the orchestra hails from 'Cologne', it's a Paris-based orchestra with an illustrious history going back to 1873. I'm pretty sure that it would have been a very French sounding band at that time, and although the LPs (my original mono plus a second hand stereo) are, as ever, locked away in the stores, that naughty Mr Sudden's latest posts have tempted me into searching on the net. It took some while, but I've ordered this

(Though for a great deal less than the two remaining copies. When it turns up we'll see.)

 What about all those 1950s and 60s Ansermet recordings with the Suisse Romande orch. for Decca? There's masses of stuff in there which presumably uses French instruments too: a huge wodge of Stravinsky (as well as plenty of Ravel and Debussy) to check out, Oz....

Reiner and I have been talking about this and French bassoons on the David Munrow thread, where it was a bit tangential... hopefully some of those posts will wend their merry way over here at some point soon.


As far as the cornet goes you'd know a lot better than I would - although perhaps it's worth a mention that the C trumpet is probably more common than the Bb in many countries. (Not all of course.) When I've seen Wagner tubas it has indeed been the horns who have played them; on the other hand the trombones have often had to tackle the bass trumpet. Which as parts for it exist in at least 3 different keys and trombonists don't normally have to transpose is perhaps not always entirely fair. Especially when Ferneyhough writes quarter-tones for it.

In my experience (from the outside although quite often with my nose pressed pretty hard up against the glass...) it's usually the principals who would sort this sort of thing out. Did you read the article on Solti and Paray trying to get people to change bassoon? - that's something I would find a little hard to imagine coming from a conductor nowadays, although I think the 'principal' conductor has a much looser relationship with the orchestra than used to be the case. Nowadays it would be rare to find an orchestra manager who had a clue about this sort of thing.

In the case of woodwind in the bel canto stuff you would in any case be talking period instruments if you really wanted to get it 'right' - and I suppose the singers would be grateful for that although something makes me think they wouldn't be cutting back on the can belto accordingly. I read that Cavallini (a clarinettist who did a lot of Verdi premieres including La Forza del Destino which has an immense clarinet obbligato in it) used a 6-key boxwood clarinet. (So a Mozart clarinet plus a key for low C#.) Have you seen his Capricci? It's hard to believe.

I don't have any direct experience of valve trombones (at least when they're not called bass trumpets... ) but I did hear and see the La Scala orchestra once upon a time in concert - and the tuba player was changing between tuba and cimbasso throughout the concert. I do think the cimbasso has a lot of potential there in that the tuba in many orchestras is rather woofy and doesn't always blend with the bitier trombones. Wonder what Notorious might think of all that?