Basses Loaded XI

Victoria Summer Music Festival I

Participants of KarrKamp

Kuniko Furuhata, mezzo-soprano

Gavin Bryars, conductor

Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 24, 2007

By Deryk Barker

Two doublebass players were once hired to play in a production of Bizet's Carmen. After the first two weeks they agreed that each would take an afternoon off and attend the matinée performance.

That evening the second bassist asked the first how the matinée had been.

"Amazing!" came the reply, "you know that bit where we play 'Boom boom, boom boom', well there are these fellows on stage singing a terrific song about a Toreador at the same time!"

I rather imagine that everybody who was on stage on Tuesday evening is already familiar with that joke - and my apologies to them. But, however feebly risible, the anecdote underlines the still-popular image of the doublebass: an instrument which does nothing more than play the bottom line while the interesting stuff goes on somewhere overhead.

The stereotype - as do all such - dies hard, despite the fact that Basses Loaded! has now entered its second decade of pachydermal gymnastics and lumbering lyricism.

Regular attendees - and I see a remarkable number of familiar faces every year - will know what to expect, although somehow Messrs. Karr and Lewis manage to ring enough changes to keep the interest piqued.

The opening Bach chorale - Karr and Lewis onstage, the other sixteen bassists ranged around the auditorium - was as all-enveloping as usual, with the intonation a little steadier than in previous years.

There followed a short sarabande by Handel - which closed with a truly subterranean pizzicato - and the Divertimento No. 70 by Haydn (not that this leaves us much the wiser), which featured a lively giocoso first movement, a delicious slow movement and a nippy minuet finale, all stylishly played.

One of the two major departures from the norm (if one can use the term about such an inimitable event as this) came in the form of Gavin Bryars' The Porazzi Fragment, arranged for basses and conductor by the composer - himself, as Karr made sure to point out, a bassist.

Thankfully Bryars gave a brief introduction to the piece, originally written for 21 solo strings and based upon the fragment in question - thirteen bars composed by Wagner over a 23-year period, it was the last music he ever played, on the piano the night he died.

Bryars specifically mentioned that Strauss's Metamorphosen was a model and there were clear similarities in the music's sinuous, labyrinthine unfolding, although at times Karr's high, keening solo line could also easily have led the unwary into thinking they were listening to the slow movement of a late Romantic concerto.

Bryars conducted an engrossing performance of this crepuscular music; my only (slight) complaint would be that we were not treated to a hearing of the fragment itself beforehand; in the case of the Strauss, the culminatory quotation from the "Eroica" symphony is immediately recognisable. In this case I would wager that few, if any in the room had heard the original fragment and so it was not really clear exactly what we were waiting for, as it were.

Having said which, this was, like all of Bryars music I have encountered, easy on the ear without ever sounding backward, and all but mesmerising in its process. Worth the price of admission by itself.

The other departure came in the second half, with a group of five Japanese "Enka" songs, in which Karr and Lewis were joined by mezzo Kuniko Furuhata.

The arrangements were by the performers themselves and offered some delectable moments - how often is it, after all, that one hears duetting between a mezzo and a bassist?

Thankfully, for those of us whose Japanese is, shall we say, less than fluent, Furuhata translated each of the lyrics for us before the song itself, demonstrating that popular music the world around revolves around the same basic themes, even if each nation puts its own particular gloss on them: I am thinking in particular of the third song, "Knitting for You in a Northern Inn", in which the singer declares that she is knitting a sweater for a lover who has already left and whom she does not expect to return.

One is tempted to remark that the sweater probably would not even have fit the errant man, and Karr was inspired by the lyric to enquire "are you sure these are popular songs?" (As a completely irrelevant aside, I'll mention that some years ago the listeners to a London radio station voted as the worst song ever a ditty named "This Pullover" by one Jess Conrad.)

Still, I have long maintained that the lyrics to most popular songs (and a lot of not-so-popular ones, to say nothing of opera librettos) are best left uncomprehended. The performances were an absolute delight, with Furuhata's lovely, bell-like tones melding beautifully with the double bass and piano. On occasion in the first song her lowest register tended to submerge in the overall texture, but otherwise one could only be impressed and pleasantly surprised at the success of this seemingly unlikely combination of music and musicians.

Ernest Bloch would, as my dear departed grandmother would have said, been 127 on Tuesday had he still been alive. His "Prayer" is a Karr staple and received an appropriately supplicatory performance from the ensemble.

Percy Weinrich's Red Rose Rag provided another example of lyrics that should be kept firmly under wraps, although the music itself was great fun; and the evening closed with Scott Joplin's perennially fresh Maple Leaf Rag and the now obligatory appearance of Shinju and Shasta, the canine component of the Karr-Lewis duo.

I'll close, though, with another highlight and another Karr-Lewis staple: Rachmaninoff's Vocalise. Its brief, lyrical span demonstrated once again why Karr and Lewis are one of music's great partnerships: you would have to go a very long way indeed to hear unanimity of playing like this, to hear limpid pianism such as Lewis's or to hear lyricism like Karr's.

The double bass may have the body of an elephant; in the hands of Gary Karr it can also have the grace of a gazelle and the soul of a poet.