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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 24, 2012
"I took my bass and walked into the centre of the studio and I just turned it upside down, placed it on my chin and balanced it and walked to the end of the studio. During that time the drummer who was a great friend of mine gave a marvellous roll on the drum and when he saw me bring the bass down to the ground he finished with a terrific cymbals crash and everything like that and of course that was wonderful, everyone so enjoyed it".
The words are those of the great Eugene Cruft, the leading British doublebassist of the first half of the twentieth century. Gaining respect as a doublebassist has, it would seem, always been something of a knack.
One cannot help but wonder what Cruft would have thought of Basses Loaded! (hereinafter referred to as BL). Would he have been surprised at the fact that, for sixteen seasons now, this jamboree of all things profundo should have regularly sold out? Perhaps, although I suspect he would have been extremely gratified too.
I like to think that the aspect of all of this that would most have pleased Cruft is the fact that even such excellent playing as is regularly on offer at BL does not preclude that sense of fun which he so evidently possessed.
For the reviewer, BL is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, it is an evening like no other, an unalloyed pleasure. On the other, actually criticising it is - as a similarly-challenged Punch reviewer put it in a piece on a book by P.G. Wodehouse - "like taking a spade to a soufflé".
As usual, we opened with a Bach chorale ("Erbarm' dich mein", which also featured last year - perhaps it is a particular favourite?) with the splendid inevitability of Harmon Lewis's weighty piano accompaniment allowing the massed - well, to be precise, spread out around the hall - ensemble to bathe the audience in the warmth of their sound. (There must also be a slight risk of those seated at the end of certain rows having an ear, or eye, taken out by an errant bow - fortunately, this misfortune has yet to occur.)
There then traditionally follows music arranged for doublebass ensemble - in this case three movements from Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks. I particularly enjoyed the lumbering agility of the minuets and the lively, albeit not brisk, finale.
Friederich August Kummer and Franz Schubert were born in the same year, 1797. Schubert, as is well known, died tragically early at thirty-one. Kummer, on the other hand, lived until the ripe old age of eighty-two. It is fascinating, although undoubtedly futile, to speculate on how musical history might have been altered had their lifespans been interchanged.
Whether or not Schubert would have composed another couple of dozen symphonies or a thousand more lieder we cannot say. Posterity would, though, have been deprived of Kummer's Six Duets for Two Cellos, Op.156.
And who, after hearing Gary Karr and Chaoli Wang play one of them, would argue that posterity would not have been the poorer without them?
This is charming, if hardly deep, music and was lovingly played. Wang produced a glorious tone when he had the melodic line and his phrasing was fully worthy of his partner.
Noriko Okamoto joined the pair for the Trio, Op.2 No.1 by Leonhard von Cal: another household name - assuming you live in a very unusual household.
Von Cal wrote over thirty trios (not to mention a significant quantity of quintets, quartets and duos) and his chamber pieces were popular among local amateurs "on whom they made no great technical demands".
Presumably these locals were not attempting to play the trios on three basses...
The opening andante featured a theme almost worthy of the great Haydn himself, although he would have made considerably more of it than von Cal was capable of. The rondo which followed was "always merry and bright". Delicious music, delectably played.
To wrap up the first part of the evening, Karr and Lewis were joined by mezzo Kuniko Furuhata for four "Japanese Sentiments".
Exactly where these songs came from (yes, Japan, I realise that) I'm not sure. Were they folk songs? The text of at least two of them would tend to suggest otherwise.
For numerous reasons, this group of songs was quite remarkable: Furuhata's voice effortlessly negotiated some dangerously wide intervals while imbuing the vocal line with enough emotion as to render her prior spoken translation of the text almost superfluous. Karr and Lewis were, well Karr and Lewis, and nobody who has ever heard the pair play need know any more.
For some reason, no doubt related to my own warped sense of humour, I especially enjoyed the third ("I am knitting you this sweater, even though I know you will never wear it") and fourth songs. The latter nicely inflates the balloon of "no fault separation" - "our love is over, we have grown apart" - before puncturing it with the final admonition: "stop biting your nails, it is a bad habit".
I could not help wondering, though, whether there was any significance in the fact that, of all the evening's participants, Furuhata was the only one who chose to wear her BL t-shirt back to front.
As is also traditional, the second half opened with a brief recital by the Karr-Lewis Duo now, I believe, in its fifth decade.
The opening movement of Mendelssohn's Cello Sonata No.2 is a turbulent, impassioned piece and received a performance which underlined the fact. A far cry from the oft-received image of Mendelssohn as a rather fussy, precise, even effete composer. For the few minutes it lasted, the evening was as much profound as profundo.
Nobody could ever accuse Niccolo Paganini of profundity - at least, not to his face - and his Two Arias with Variations were typical: almost, but not quite, memorably melodies which were then elaborated on in as technically challenging a way as possible. By which, I mean challenging for the violin. If Paganini's contemporaries believed him in league with the devil, what would they have made of Karr?
The frivolous nature of the music enabled the duo to indulge in their trademark humour, which raised chuckles - and more - from the house.
Finally, of course, the entire ensemble (all twenty of them this year) assembled on stage for the jovial final group.
Kevin Kaisershot's Three and Three Quarters is subtitled "A Trivial Trifle"; perhaps, but it is certainly a tuneful one.
Bernhard Alt's Quartet for Basses is a BL favourite, as indeed it should be. Even though Alt was a violinist (he played with the Berlin Philharmonic, no less) he clearly understood and appreciated the possibilities of the lower instrument.
I particularly enjoyed the humour - not to mention choreography - of the finale.
All good things must come to an end and the end of Basses Loaded! is signalled by the arrival on stage of the Karr-Lewis canine contingent.
This year elder statesdog Shinju (his fifteenth BL) and Shiro were joined by Sumi; each displayed a different attitude to the event, but their presence on - or, in the case of Sumi, off - stage, as the ensemble, plus Lewis, played Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag (another BL favourite) underlined the fact that Basses Loaded feels more like a family reunion than anything else.
The bassists: Richard Backus, MacKenzie Carroll, Alessandra
Grasso, Daniela Grasso, Logan Hedgepath, Jan Heise, Cemil
Kandemir, Gary Karr, Sarah Klein, Zoe Kumagi, Richard Netherton,
Laura Nygren, Noriko Okamoto, Adam Overacker, Sergio Palomino,
Lukas Peladeau, Günter Rohde, Julia Viherlahti, Chaoli
Wang, Emily Wood.
The pianist: Harmon Lewis.
The singer: Kuniko Furuhata
The dogs: Shinju, Shiro, Sumi.
Acknowledgement: Yogi Berra for "deep depths".
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