As a musician and an artist, it is such an honor to work with composers whose music you feel a real connection to. Hence, I consider myself an extremely lucky and blessed individual for having surrounded myself with not only composers whose music I love, but individuals I sincerely care for and love as people.
The three concertos on this album have a very strong personal connection to me as all three composers are my dear friends (RIP Eino), starting from Tõnu whom I go back to our toddler years. Tõnu may not have been the first composer I had commissioned but it was only a matter of time with him, and he has graced me with several amazing solo works since.

Eino’s piece in turn came as a commission from the former Estonian Ministry of Culture which I premiered in 2002 with the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. I must thank my lucky stars here to have performed it some years later with the great Neeme Järvi only a couple months before Eino Tamberg’s death. Neeme, who basically grew up with Eino, gave me some invaluable advice in terms of style and character to this fantastic work. I’m forever grateful to him for that. Eino loved to laugh and was just the most gracious of people, full of love, humour and kindness, and it is very evident in this concerto. We became quick friends in the process of him creating this concerto and remained close until his passing. In fact, the very last piece Eino wrote was a beautiful solo work for bassoon, “Call for a Dance” (and Eino LOVED to dance) Op.138, written in the summer of 2010, a work I premiered in 2011.

Finally, I had been fixed in getting a concerto from Erkki-Sven, whose groove ridden, 70’s rock influenced music had always fascinated me, and still does. The idea came to fruition in 2003 largely thanks to my dear friend, conductor/producer Kristjan Järvi and the Norrlands Operan Orchestra in Umeå, Sweden, that commissioned it. Through some unforeseen scheduling issues, however, Erkki-Sven ran out of time to write a new concerto. He felt terrible, of course, but what to do – we had a concerto date in the calendar, and just 5 months away. Help came from another maestro and friend, Paavo Järvi, who suggested to have one of his favorite works of Erkki-Sven’s, his Cello Concerto, to be rewritten for the bassoon. Granted, it caused a bit of a stir in Sweden, but the result was brilliant.

Last but not least, I have always loved a good challenge, and since I loved the music of all three composers, I did not hesitate to ask them to write whatever their mind poured out, and I operate in the same terms to this day with whatever I play – always curious, always learning, always searching. The only limits given to them were the lowest possible note and the highest I was comfortable with (G5). Why did it take me twenty years to finally record these works? Everything in life happens for a reason, and I would say it was probably for the best as I was able to grow and mature with them. It was an immense pleasure to record all three with my friend, Mihhail Gerts and the fabulous Estonian National Symphony Orchestra, during a rather intense period of 4 days. It was quite a wild ride, but here it is now. I hope it brings the listener joy and new discoveries about the bassoon as a very vocal, highly expressive and flexible instrument.

From three points of view
While certainly not the most popular choice among instruments to have been graced with extensive repertoire from the Baroque era through the First Viennese School to the early Romantic period, many crucial composers of those respective times did dedicate concertos to the bassoon – Vivaldi, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart and Carl Maria von Weber among them. Mozart even wrote three, though only one, the concerto in B-flat major K. 191 survived. Most often, these concertos were composed explicitly for specific musicians – virtuosos at this particularly powerful, resonant woodwind instrument. That today’s Estonian bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann is the dedicatee of not just one but more than half a dozen concertos can be understood not only as a testament to the reed player’s distinguished instrumental prowess, but also as evidence of the bassoon’s evolution over the past centuries, the modification the instrument experienced, the expansion its repertoire has undergone and the significance it has thus gained.

Today, many concertos exist for bassoon. The expansion of the instrument’s range and increased ease of its playability through technological advances in the 19th and 20th centuries, together with the emergence of progressively sophisticated genres, pushed the instrument into a new era of emancipation. A period of transformation that, one could argue, is still in full bloom today. For Kuuskmann himself is a catalyst of change. In order to adequately perform Eino Tamberg’s Bassoon Concerto, Op. 108, Kuuskmann had his instrument altered, adding three keys to the upper register instead of an initial single one, which gives him more agility to fleetly manoeuvre through the faster passages. When he first premiered the piece in 2002, the bassoonist had to adjust sections of the score in order to play them. Only later, after updating his instrument, was he able to express the most demanding sections in the higher register as notated in the score. His motto today, when faced with similar inquiries of composers: “If they can hum it, there’s a good chance I can play it”.

Indeed, the three concertos compiled in this programme are connected by a shared elevated complexity of their solo parts. Complex not for the sake of boasting, but primarily to demonstrate the instrument’s versatility, from its deep horn-like surges starting at B-flat, a balanced cantabile baritone reminiscent of the violoncello to expressive outbursts in the higher register – seldom harsh, always commanding.

Completed within three years of each other, between 2001 and 2004, the concertos share more commonalties. Tõnu Kõrvits, Eino Tamberg and Erkki-Sven Tüür all wrote their pieces explicitly for Martin Kuuskmann. All three concertos were premiered by the Estonian bassoonist – Tamberg’s in 2002, Kõrvits’s Beyond The Solar Fields in 2004, both in Tallinn, and Tüür’s Concerto For Bassoon And Orchestra in 2003, in Umeå, Sweden. All three works offer a broad glance at contemporary classical music from an Estonian point of view that may be more omnipresent and influential today than ever. Additionally, Kuuskmann has had a close personal relationship with all three composers – Kõrvits was even one of his closest childhood friends.

Tõnu Kõrvits’s approach on Beyond the Solar Fields is an especially contemporary take on musical organisation in that it incorporates a field recording of a woman singing the Estonian folk song “Helletus” – the score’s instrumentation reads “For solo bassoon, orchestra and tape.” Stylistically however, Kõrvits doesn’t deny his musical heritage but embraces devices borrowed from early 20th century impressionism, stretching the music to Eastern realms, with heavy use of the double harmonic minor scale, microtonal flexions in the bassoon part that are mirrored by the glissandi in the string section as well as an at times clarinet-like sonorousness of the bassoon, consistent with the piece’s underlying folk song inspiration.
Unfolding in one long movement, introduced with nine patiently elaborated measures of just the bassoon, lush orchestral colorations are interspersed with sparsely accompanied solo sections that make use of the instrument’s multiphonic range and its wide array of percussive faculties. The pre-recorded tape doesn’t enter until just before the very end, accompanied by tense orchestral harmonies that intermittently drown out the playback recording. Sustained strings and a subsequent bassoon solo statement follow like an afterthought. The tradition is as present as ever, but newly contextualised. Something another Estonian composer, the late Veljo Tormis understood better than anyone, famously saying, “I do not use folk song, it is folk song that uses me.”

Distinctly contrasting to Kõrvits’s piece in its formal structure, yet equally diverse in its stylistic ambitions, Eino Tamberg’s Bassoon Concerto is representative of the composer’s life-long search for a musical diction that diverges from Romantic paragons in its expressive extremes, but does not completely neglect tonal ideals. A true individual among the neo-classicists, Tamberg held a special interest for the bassoon in his work; even the last piece he wrote before his death in 2010, Invitation to Dance, Op. 138, was written for the woodwind.His is the only of the three concertos in this programme where Kuuskmann collaborated with the composer. Often a composer of extremes – in pitch, pace and dynamic spectrum –, Tamberg welcomed the bassoonist’s input regarding the solo part, keeping what was in the realm of the possible and altering what wasn’t.

Four movements – the tempo markings read Vivo, Allegro irrequieto, Lento and Vivo leggiero – unravel with extreme urgency, spurred on by a sumptuous percussion section with Stravinskyan panache, characteristic of Tamberg. The composer exhausts the entire range of the bassoon in his score, including several ascents to the high D (another nod to Stravinsky), but never allows virtuosic detours at the cost of the concerto’s formal coherence and orchestral stringency. The last movement begins with a particularly striking ensemble dissection, led by clarinets, bassoon, timpani and piano, who by completing each other’s phrases create an aural mosaic. This brings with it a Fugue-like quality, a reference to the fundamentals, however fundamentally transfigured they may be.

If there is another kindred trait to all three concertos in this programme, it is their embrace of variance. For each concerto, in the respective composers’ own way, veers towards disparate sonic landscapes within the blink of an eye. In Erkki-Sven Tüür’s case, this doesn’t come as a surprise. His beginnings were famously polystilistic, with an extensive background in the eclecticism of progressive rock. His early works as a composer would alternate traditionally harmonic and atonal material, homophonic and polyphonic passages and an atmospheric gracefulness with explosive eruptions within but a couple of measures. Traces of this adventurous inclination remain in his work today.

Tüür’s Concerto For Bassoon And Orchestra – a two-movement-stream-of-thought-journey – is based on an earlier work, the composer’s first cello concerto from 1999. In fact, only the solo part was altered, adapting the cellos rawer tenor tone to ranges on the bassoon capable of capturing a similar expressiveness, often to a more vehement end. This more driven aspect is especially prominent when the tempo accelerates – the bassoon concerto already being faster than most interpretations of the cello concerto as it is. One such instance can be heard just after the exposition at the 3-minute mark, when pianississimo abruptly grows into fortissimo for a lengthy string of 16th-notes – a theme carried from the bassoon to the string parts and back again in harmonious counterpoint. Back are the fundamentals. What follows is an impressive elaboration of idioms from several eras with Romantic peaks and a passionate bassoon part that travels the full gamut of the instrument’s possibilities.

The currents are strong in each of the three concertos, pulling and tugging at the core-compositional fabrics from all directions and stretching them to their extremes. Who better to invite to perform these different views on the bassoon than a champion of the instrument like Martin Kuuskmann. Recorded at the Estonia Concert Hall, Tallinn in 2021 with Mihhail Gerts conducting the Estonia National Symphony Orchestra, Kuuskmann captures captivating entries into the still growing, inspired bassoon literature.
Tüür, describing the process of composing, has explained: „if you put a seed in the soil, you don’t know what kind of shape it will finally take. It always surprises you and yet it’s always so natural. If you look backwards, then you have this feeling that it’s the only way it could exist. There’s no other way. This is something I want to also achieve with my compositions when I listen to them. You don’t know where it finally ends up. But after you’ve listened to it, you decide this is the only way.“ It’s an illuminating thought that — even if it wasn’t shared by two other composers presented here — gives us another perspective on this unique programme.

Friedrich Kunzmann