Robert Oppelt’s Album of Double Bass Encores

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

A little over four years ago MSR Classics released an album of music for double bass performed by Robert Oppelt, Principal Bass with the National Symphony Orchestra, entitled simply The Double Bass: Robert Oppelt & Friends. The “program” for the recording amounted to a survey of bass music from the nineteenth century to the present. This included the first six of a collection of twelve waltzes for solo bass composed by Domenico Dragonetti.

This past summer MSR Classics released a follow-up album, The Double Bass Encore!: Robert Oppelt & Friends. This provided Oppelt with the opportunity to record the remaining six Dragonetti waltzes, all twelve of which make for excellent encore selections for any performance featuring a bass player. In that “encore spirit” most of the selections are relatively short. They include two pieces by Serge Koussevitzky, best known as a conductor but whose instrument was the bass. However, the album concludes on a serious note with a duo concertante that Krzysztof Penderecki composed in 2010. While this piece is less than five minutes in duration, it is far from an “afterthought” where concert programming is concerned.

I owe much of my own awareness of the bass repertoire to Gary Karr, whose BBC documentaries were shown in the United States on Public Television. I was quickly drawn to Karr’s rhetorical introduction of his instrument, first declaring that the bass is like chocolate and then shifting direction by observing that you have to hug it when you play it. In later years however my interest in the bass tended to shift over the the jazz domain, due, in no small part, to my interest in Charles Mingus.

There is a bit of jazz rhetoric on Oppelt’s recent album, primarily due to a piece by John Clayton, whose own major influence was Ray Brown. “Bach to Blues” is one of those many pieces that tries to synthesize the more “exploratory” passages of Johann Sebastian Bach (most of which were probably written for pedagogical purposes) with a jazzy rhetoric that may or may not explore adventurous possibilities for improvisation. “Bach to Blues” does not sound as if it allows for improvisation, but it still manages to do justice to synthesis that crosses over about three centuries.

I tend to agree with Oppelt that six Dragonetti waltzes is enough for a single album. As a result, I definitely appreciate the diversity of the compositions he provides as context for those waltzes. My guess is that this is an album that I shall be inclined to revisit from time to time.