The bassoon is hardly the most glamorous instrument, but musician Peter Whelan enjoys being right there ‘when everything goes wrong’
BEFORE MEETING up with the bassoonist Peter Whelan, I trawled through old listings files to see what he had been up to in Dublin when he was young. I came across a Peter Whelan who was a tenor, another who was a piano accompanist, and another who composed a work for a wind ensemble. They turned out to be the one person.
Whelan was a choral scholar when he was at Trinity College Dublin. “[That was] just to get through college,” he says.
He used to accompany others “as a sideline” when he was a student in Dublin and in Basel, and still does a bit of continuo playing. He wrote the piece for an ensemble he was playing in.
Whelan was 16 and had a decade of piano lessons behind him before he took up the bassoon. The piano was too isolating for him, he says. “I’d always missed playing with other people,” he says. It was more than a little late to take up a string instrument.
“Late-starter instruments are the oboe, the bassoon and maybe the horn,” he explains. “I had an affinity for those instruments when I heard them in orchestral recordings. I think it was through Olive Smith, who had a foundation to start people off on the oboe and the bassoon, that I got started, and it just took off from there.”
He felt a connection with the bassoon he had never experienced with the piano. “There was something about the soulfulness of the sound,” he says.
Meeting Sergio Azzolini, a professor of bassoon, in Basel, proved a turning point. “He engaged me straight away. He was an amazing musician, and he showed just how much was possible on the bassoon,” he says.
Whelan describes his career as something that just fell into place. “Maybe because of the instrument I play. If you have an ability, you’re immediately in demand, from an amateur point of view, in college orchestras, and also starting to dep in symphony orchestras. That was never a problem. So a career path sort of mapped itself out. I was never in control of it. I was just doing what came along.”
In truth he wasn’t just drifting. A spell with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra presented him with a great training ground, though he says he was put off by the “slightly cynical corporate attitude of the world-weary musician”.
He became unhappy. “There was something jarring. At the back of my head was the idea that a chamber orchestra would be the ideal job. A dream job for me had always been something like the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. I’d heard their recordings. A small group of people. Very individual.
“It was just a really big bit of luck that when that job came up I got it. Since then, it’s been a matter of finding my voice, and finding the right repertoire and the right kind of people to work with. That’s always a kind of catalyst for change.”
His job in Scotland allows him real flexibility. He can take off six or seven weeks between October and May, and even more during the summer. It's no sinecure. He gets paid only for the work he does. But it means he has time to play with the Irish Baroque Orchestra, and he will be in the Gabrieli Consort and Players for a performance of Mendelssohn's Elijahusing period instruments at the Proms in London in August.
There are no James Galways of the bassoon. Not now, at any rate. There simply is not the breadth of repertoire on which to build such a career. But the instrument everyone gets to know as the Grandfather in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolfhas an illustrious history. "There are big patches in the repertoire where there are things missing. But there was a golden era, stretching from Bach and Vivaldi straight through to Mozart.
“This was a time when the bassoon was not the esoteric instrument that it is now. It was widely played, very popular. There were some celebrity soloists who were playing at the time.
"There's a great repertoire from the cantatas of Bach and his orchestral suites, and taking in Vivaldi's 40 concertos, of course. There are these amazing obligato arias in Handel's operas – in Ariodante, for instance – at the central moment when everything goes wrong. The bassoon is always there in these stressed moments, with lovely sailing lines.
“The greatest composer at that time for bassoon was Mozart. He had this amazing affinity. He wrote a sonata, at least one concerto. A late work – a quintet for piano and wind – was one of his personal favourites.
“The real gems in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s lot are the piano concertos, which have incredible wind writing. And also, of course, the operas.
"In Figaro, which I'm playing in a few weeks' time, it's an incredible bassoon part. It's almost a role within the opera, a voiceless role, of course, but laughing and commenting on the characters, especially when Figaro is around. It's so subversive. Also in Don Giovanni,when something seedy is about to happen, you hear the bassoons rumbling around. Mozart understood the instrument absolutely.
“Something tapered off after that. But during this time there was a lot of currency to being a bassoonist. Even in Dublin, the frieze in St Michan’s Church, which used to be on the £50 notes, shows lots of recorders and oboes, and two bassoons at the back. It was culturally more significant then.”
Peter Whelan plays Vivaldi with the ensemble, La Serenissima, at Christ Church Cathedral on Friday as part of the KBC Music in Great Irish Houses Festival. He will also appear in the West Cork Chamber Music Festival, which opens in Bantry on June 24th
