HPO bassoonist takes on Pleyel
Eric Hall says it’s ‘really, really exciting to get to play something new and different’
If you think you hear a bit of Billie Holiday in Ignaz Pleyel’s “Bassoon Concerto,” you’re not alone.
So does HPO principal bassoonist Eric Hall, who’s not only a big Lady Day fan, but the soloist in the Pleyel with the HPO under music director Gemma New in FirstOntario Concert Hall this Saturday at 7:30 p.m.
“It actually almost has a direct quote of Billie Holiday ‘I’ll be seeing you,’” said Hall of the Pleyel from his Toronto home.
“It’s really cool. It is the second theme in the second movement. It’s quite funny when it comes up in the piece. I was like, ‘Oh, I know that song. Wait, isn’t that Billie Holiday?’”
Now, don’t worry if that musical reference passes by your ear undetected. It’ll come back because Hall will riff on it near the end of the second movement.
No need to call in the copyright lawyers, though.
Any similarity between that brief passage in the Pleyel and the 1938 song by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal is surely purely coincidental.
And besides, the Pleyel concerto, of which the Czech Museum of Music in Prague has a manuscript copy dated 1800, is in the public domain, its composer having died in 1831.
The Pleyel is being programmed on a concert that caps off the HPO’s Haydn Festival.
If you’re wondering why a bassoon concerto by Haydn wasn’t programmed, it’s because there isn’t one.
Pleyel, who as a 15-year-old in 1772 lodged and studied composition with Haydn in Eisenstadt, was one of almost two dozen classical era composers who wrote a bassoon concerto, the best known of them being Mozart.
“Mozart is the go-to bassoon concerto that everyone puts on a program,” said Hall.
“From a player’s perspective, it’s always really fun to play something you don’t play all the time.
“I’ve played the Mozart on several occasions with orchestra. The Mozart is a beautiful piece and I really love playing it, but it’s really, really exciting to get to play something new and different and especially something that’s not done very often.”
This will be the first rodeo with the Pleyel for the American-born Hall, who studied at Eastman and Juilliard and held a position with the New World Symphony before catching on with the Canadian Opera Company’s orchestra some 25 years ago and the HPO some 10 years after that.
He did a run-through for his students at Wilfrid Laurier University last Friday.
“They were just, ‘Wow, I can’t believe I’ve never heard this piece before,’” said Hall of his students.
“I’ve never played it before in public and I think that probably there aren’t many bassoonists who have.
“I’ve never heard of it being played in North America. It’s been done a couple of times in Germany. (There are two recordings of the Pleyel currently in the catalogue, both on German labels.) The orchestra parts came from Germany.”
As did Hall’s bassoon. It’s an 8000 series Heckel bassoon built in 1938 in Wiesbaden and heard in the pit of that city’s opera house for two decades. Hall has happily had it in his possession since last September.
The HPO bill will be bookended by Haydn, opening with the “Overture to L’anima del filosofo” (The Philosopher’s Soul) and closing with the popular fourmovement “Symphony no. 88” from 1787.
In between, in addition to the Pleyel, there’s Muzio Clementi’s “Symphony in B Flat” also dating from 1787, as well as two numbers from the ballet music for Mozart’s opera “Idomeneo,” the “Chaconne” and the “Pas seul.”
Right after the concert on the FirstOntario Concert Hall’s mezzanine, HPO patrons can catch the Pro-Am Jam as Gemma New and 40 or so local amateurs along with roughly 11 HPO musicians briefly microwave and then perform the opening 123 bars of the first movement from Haydn’s “Symphony no. 104,” the socalled “London Symphony.”
Sunday, February 18, at 3 p.m. in the Burlington Performing Arts Centre, 440 Locust St., Claudio Vena’s Symphony on the Bay performs Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” with narrator Tim Carroll plus selections by Applebaum, Mendelssohn, Rossini and Bernstein along with 2017 Young Artists’ Competition winners Joshua Lee on violin and soprano Christina Bell in works by SaintSaëns and Puccini.
Tickets: $43, senior $36.50, youth (16 to 24) $24.50, under 16 $12.
Call 905-681-6000.