CSM in Götzis

CSM puts the bassoon in the spotlight

The CSM (here in an archive photo) once again thrilled the audience.

(Bild: CSM/Lilli Löbl)

The fifth subscription concert of the original sound orchestra Concerto Stella Matutina was conducted by bassoonist Sergio Azzolini. The audience in Götzis rewarded the great performance with frenetic applause. 

In contrast to many other years, this last subscription concert of the season, which our local original sound orchestra performed on Friday and Saturday in Götzis, hardly corresponded to the festive season, unless you generally consider baroque music to be Christmas music. Of course, the Concerto Matutina had just performed Bach's "Christmas Oratorio" in Regensburg with a choir there, but in Götzis it was all about concertos for the bassoon, written under the influence of Antonio Vivaldi, but for the orchestra in Prague. "Per la virtuosissima orchestra di Praga", as the Venetian master put it.

Whether Vivaldi meant this mega praise flatteringly or seriously remains to be seen. But Count Morzin's Prague orchestra was certainly very capable, measured against the scores that the Götzn audience got to hear. Sergio Azzolini was both conductor and soloist, who, in addition to his work on the modern bassoon, was able to prove himself in the most prominent original sound orchestras. At the first concert on Friday at the Kulturbühne AmBach, there were still coordination problems between him and the orchestra in the first two works, but these were subsequently overcome by Azzolini himself and concertmaster David Drabek with more lively body language.

A total of seven concertos were played, two each by Johann Anton Reichenauer and Benedetto Marcello before the interval, followed by works from the Bohemian school but influenced by Italy, two by Jan Dismas Zelenka and one by František Jiránek, whereby these latter works were musically a little more demanding than the previous ones.

According to a baroque testimony, a virtuoso bassoonist should have "a good heart and sensitivity", as Sergio Azzolini informed the audience in one of his speeches. Azzolini himself, the other soloists such as Barbara Meditz, bassoon, Giovanni De Angeli and Alesia Varapayeva, oboes and Thomas Platzgummer, violoncello, as well as all the musicians of the Concerto Stella Matutina played with heart and sensitivity throughout the evening. On Sunday, they will play this program again in Bolzano and will certainly make the audience there, as in Götzis, cheer.