Camille Saint-Saëns – Sonata for bassoon and piano op. 168

Camille Saint-Saëns – Sonata for bassoon and piano op. 168
Ondřej Šindelář – bassoon, Dušan Holý – piano

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nin9kFXy3Oc

First thing that stand out for me is the tone color of bassoon. The strength of tone is good but the color is thin. The reason of this problem might be the reed. Most of the performers prefer thinner reed in order to play easier but it changes tone really much. Tone color differs according to the mouth position also. Player should think like he is singing an aria and throat should be flexible, because tone color comes from the mouth, throat and diaphragm. That is my opinion of course. What I like about this recording is that the performer played very energetic and the intonation is good. First movement should be soft and played with darker sound but the performer’s color is great for the second movement. Energetic and sharp, but staccatos should be more determined and short. At 4:25 music should be floating, all the notes are important and performer should give importance to quavers. Dynamics are not clear in this recording but it can be because of the recording itself. However, in my opinion, in contemporary music dynamics are very important and they should have big differences among themselves.