In 2019 Lola Descours made history by becoming the first woman to win a prize at the (16th) International Tchaikovsky Competition in St. Petersburg, and ever since has been on a mission to champion the enormous possibilities of her instrument.
Below Lola talks about her new album, and you can watch and listen too.
For Lola Descours, winning the prestigious Tchaikovsky competition in 2019 “was a real springboard for my desire to introduce the bassoon as a solo instrument” to a wider audience. A passionate advocate for the bassoon and its often underestimated capacity for nuance and expression, Lola Descours performs repertoire of great variety, including the colourful music of Glinka, lyrical Tchaikovsky, romantic Rachmaninov and Rimsky-Korsakov, powerful Scriabin and sardonic Shostakovich. The programme is brought up to date with a dream-like piece by contemporary Russian composer Lera Auerbach.
All of these works apart from Lera Auberach’s piece are arrangements for bassoon and piano. As Descours puts it: “Transcription was an important part of our work on this album.” This process enabled the duo “to be inspired by the original instrument, to get closer to it, to respect its particularities while offering with this adaptation a new perspective, a new light.”
There are fascinating contrasts to be found in this repertoire, bringing out different facets of the bassoon’s sound, as Descours explains: “Between the Romantic works and the sharper writing of Shostakovich or Lera Auerbach, the technical approach is very different, especially the articulation and the use of vibrato. The contexts behind each composition are also very different: a love crisis for Rachmaninov or a life under Soviet dictatorship for Shostakovich.” In the Shostakovich Preludes heard on the album, “the bassoon has perhaps the role in which we are most accustomed to hearing it, alternately sarcastic, dark or clownish. My desire is to broaden the perspectives of this instrument and to show its lyrical and vocal qualities, which are so dear to me.”
Of her collaboration with Paloma Koulder, Lola Descours says: “Naturally, I wanted to record this album with my school friend Paloma Kouider… We have in common the subtlety of French culture and a love of the deep sonorities, rich in low harmonics, of Russian music.” The pair paid close attention to the different ways their instruments interact in these varied works: “When the two instruments sing in unison or octaves, we try to achieve a fusion of timbres that fulfils great lyrical flights, as often happens in the Rachmaninov Sonata. In some of Shostakovich’s Preludes, the bassoon becomes as percussive as the piano, and then we completely change the sound in the arrangements of melodies, when it is the piano that is inspired by the bassoon’s breath.”
The result is an album that has allowed Lola Descours “to pay homage to all these composers that I have worked with so closely in my life as a musician, while opening the way for the bassoon as a solo instrument.”
Foibles and anecdotes can sometimes make you smile with their ridiculousness, and other times incite the darkest despair by showing the cruelty and vanity of existence. Russian authors have often pointed out this heart-rending contradiction. In Gogol’s short story The Overcoat, for example, should you mock or pity poor Akaky Akakievich? The protagonist and antihero, at first too stingy to deign to clothe himself properly, despite the bitter cold, finally experiences a ‘radiant vision’ thanks to his new coat that transcends his existence.
This question echoes in some ways the complex characteristics of the bassoon. Although sometimes jokingly referred to as the ‘clown of the orchestra’, the bassoon can also be noble in lyrical passages, and its low register gives it great depth and tragic power.
Often steeped in music, Russian literature also makes references to the bassoon. In Nevsky Prospect, an extract from Gogol’s Petersburg’s Tales, the artist Piskariov discovers that the girl he has fallen madly in love with is a prostitute. He tries to take refuge in a dreamland in order to find his Ideal. In one of his last dreams before succumbing to opium, he meets a strange official sometimes taking the appearance of a bassoon. Another masterpiece of Russian literature, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, introduces us to a strange character called Koroviev, who sometimes calls himself Fagott, the German name for the bassoon.
It is precisely in the Russian musical repertoire that the bassoon creates passages that are now emblematic of its tonal features: Prokofiev associates it with the grumpy grandfather of Peter and the Wolf, while it opens, in a solo, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in a high register, so unheard of at the time that some listeners thought they were listening to a saxophone. So it seemed only natural to turn to Russian repertoire for this recording, which unfolds a melodic frieze exploring many aspects of Russian culture and history. It spans more than two centuries, from Glinka, the “father of Russian music”, to Auerbach, a contemporary composer.
The choice to give pride of place to transcriptions rather than to the original bassoon repertoire is a militant artistic gesture, as the instrument’s repertoire is not quantitatively equal to its richness. These transcriptions certainly make it possible to rediscover well known pieces with other timbres; they also show how much the bassoon can make its own, and even enrich, those pieces not originally intended for it.
In the opening piece, the title ‘Etude’ should not mislead the listener: Scriabin’s Etude Op.8 No.11 is not an exercise for apprentice musicians, but a real concert piece, Andante cantabile. The intense and incandescent melody is given an extra thrill by the bassoon, which has the ability to vibrate, unlike the piano for which this piece was written.
Shostakovich’s work is inseparable from the Stalinist era. The composer, scarred by numerous humiliations and intimidations from Moscow, felt for a long time that his life was at stake with each composition. The 24 Preludes for piano do not belong to the group of pieces that earned him the label of ‘enemy of the people’. The six preludes chosen, however, retain a grating, irreverent quality that is perfectly in keeping with the sarcastic characteristics of the bassoon.
There are many parallels between the voice and the bassoon, so it is not surprising that many of the melodies find a suitable channel in the bassoon.
Rimsky-Korsakov, the youngest of the “Mighty Five” was still very young when he composed the oriental-inflected melody The Nightingale in Love with the Rose.
Some fifteen years after composing his Nocturne from the Six Pieces for Piano, Op.19, Tchaikovsky adapted it himself for cello and orchestra. Although they do not belong to the same family of instruments, the cello is very similar to the bassoon in its low range, lyricism, flexibility and similarities to the human voice. Both serve the melancholic melody of Andante Sentimental wonderfully.
In addition to these transcriptions, a new work has been added to the original bassoon repertoire. Lera Auerbach, a Russian pianist, composer, author and poet now living in the United States, was inspired by Milton’s poem Il Penseroso (which was also set to music by Handel) for I Walk Unseen. A dreamer seeks to recover the memory of a dream, but it proves elusive. His fruitless search leads him to anxiety and then to anger, and the dream world gradually transforms into a poisonous nightmare.
Glinka’s Elegy, composed to a poem by Pushkin’s friend Baratynski, takes us back to the roots of Russian music, as it is an early piece by the man considered to be the first great Russian composer. So it is kind of a dawn, but also a nod to a great musical sunset: Shostakovich quoted it in Symphony No.15, a musical testament in which he made many other references.
Finally, with Rachmaninov, heir to a great romantic tradition, we come to the centrepiece of the programme. Sonata for cello and piano, Op.19, is clearly the longest, but also the most daring in terms of transcription. As a virtuoso pianist, Rachmaninov composed some of the most technically challenging works for his instrument. This is the case with Piano Concerto No.2, composed at the same time as this sonata. The piano element of this sonata is indeed formidable, but the bassoon part also requires great agility to meet the demands of this work, where large melodic pages alternate with rhythmically exceptionally lively passages. The third movement, Andante, contrasts in its serenity and luminosity with the other movements of the sonata, where a romantic frenzy is unleashed, from the passion of the Allegro moderato and the hallucinatory atmosphere of the Allegro scherzando to the mad energy of the final Allegro mosso.
© Mathilde Serraille
English translation © Sarah Canet
