Tuple: Darker Things
Bright Shiny Things

Any listener harbouring doubts about the credibility of the bassoon as a lead voice need only spend time with Darker Things to be convinced otherwise. On their Tuple debut, Lynn Hileman and Rachael Elliott demonstrate that the instrument is as capable of inhabiting that role as a violin, piano, or otherwise. Helping that along immeasurably is the set-list the two devised for the recording, five seminal, single-movement works spanning three decades by Sofia Gubaidulina, Chiel Meijering, Marc Mellits, Louis Andriessen, and Michael Daugherty. Recorded at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the recording's pieces cut a wide swathe, from the exuberance of Mellits's Black to the poignancy of Andriessen's Lacrimosa.

If the playing's tight, it's attributable in part to Hileman and Elliott's long-standing relationship, the two initially meeting at the Yale School of Music in the late ‘90s and eventually founding Tuple in 2006. Both bring impressive CVs to the project, each a bassoon teacher (Elliott at Longy School of Music of Bard College and Hileman at West Virginia University) boasting a long list of performing and recording credits. That the playing on Darker Things is virtuosic doesn't surprise.

Originally written for the bass clarinet duo Sqwonk, Mellits's Black (2008) is the only piece on the release not originally written for bassoon duo. Upon hearing it, however, its potential was evident to Hileman, which in turn prompted the creation of a Tuple arrangement in 2009. Its rhythmic drive and rapid cyclical patterns make it an ideal opener, especially when so much breathless activity is packed into its five-minute frame. Whereas some composers might write a single bassoon work, Dutch composer Meijering (b. 1954) has written hundreds (staggeringly, his total output exceeds a thousand works). Apparently representative of his music for bassoon ensembles, Nocturnal Residents (1989) is, similar to Black, rhythmically robust, daring, and at times jocular. Rapid triplet sections intertwine with dissonant chords, percussive key clicks, and foreboding flourishes, the whole evoking a nighttime landscape teeming with myriad creature types.

At the recording's center are pieces by two of our most renowned composers, Gubaidulina (b. 1931) and Andriessen (b. 1939). The earliest work on the release, her Duo Sonata (1977) was also the first piece Hileman and Elliott performed together in 2006. Considered a masterpiece within the bassoon duo repertoire, the eleven-minute setting gives Tuple a remarkable range of material to play with, from guttural trills and static harmonies to microchromaticism. In deftly threading such ideas into a cohesive, organically developing structure, Gubaidulina ensures Duo Sonata doesn't come across as a mere pastiche, and of the five settings presented, it's perhaps the most encompassing, as far as techniques are concerned. The most moving piece of the five, Andriessen's Lacrimosa (1991) exudes an ethereal, sacred character, the Dutch composer in this case straddling realms involving contrapuntal techniques of long-standing and chromaticism and microtonality emblematic of the modern era. Tones slowly overlap in a way that challenges conventional notions of tonality and harmony, the bassoonists executing their parts with delicacy, deliberation, and at the level of a hush.

Daugherty's Bounce (1988) caps the release with a striking eight-minute exercise in hocketing, the bassoonists positioned far apart to maximize the effect. Following an opening featuring slow, extended tones (and overtones), the piece suddenly turns animated in a manner consistent with its title, wending thereafter through contrasting explorations of tempo, harmony, dynamics, and intensity. At one moment, notes fire frenetically back and forth but then just as quickly arrestation sets in to bring things to a ponderous, almost ominous close. In addition to the superior level of the performances and the compositions, another thing that recommends the recording is contrast, not so much the contrasts within each work but the stylistic contrasts between the five. In selecting the pieces they did, Hileman and Elliott show how adaptable the bassoon is to both lively material such as Black and a stirring lament like Lacrimosa.

September 2019