Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Ondine label (ODE1089-2) is from the Bassoon Concerto by Finnish composer, journalist and writer Jouni Kaipainen (b. 1956). The second movement’s concept derives from a musical play for children titled Hämärän maa (Land of twilight), where a rag doll becomes animated and dances with a piccolo; in the concerto, the piccolo dances with the solo bassoon, about which Kaipainen noted: “I feel that the bassoon is a far more versatile instrument than we are led to believe from school concerts onwards. To regard it only as the ‘clown of the orchestra’ is to disregard a large portion of its potential – or, at the very least, we should then understand the term ‘clown’ as a mixture of comedy and tragedy in the manner of Don Quixote, Chaplin, Pierrot or the characters of the commedia dell’arte in general.”