It was a pleasure to have a free evening in my orchestra's busy schedule, March 21, 1972, enabling me to hear Kenneth Pasmanick give the world premiere performance of David Amram's new bassoon concerto at the Kennedy Center in Washington with the National Symphony Orchestra directed by Antal Dorati.
I have known Pasmanick's fine playing for many years and am also an admirer of the music of David Amram. The 41-year old composer has written many successful chamber and orchestral works, operas, cantatas and music for plays and motion pictures and is a close personal friend of the bassoon soloist. A most likely collaboration, and I was very pleased with the result.
I feel we have a welcome addition to the literature for bassoon and orchestra, modern, interesting, grateful to the performer and - best of all - an authentic American concerto in style and effect. I think this music should be played in many countries and that it will please audiences in Amsterdam or London as well as in Washington.
Pasmanick commissioned the concerto in 1969 with the help of a friend, Robert Bialek, and he will soon record the work in Europe. Amram's usual publisher is Peters Editions in New York. If any changes in the concerto could be made, I think a slightly extended final movement would balance the first two movements which are very comfortable in length. The solo horn introduction and close of the slow movement is most effective and beautifully outlines the lyric song of the bassoon.
Mr. Amram's notes on the concerto best describe its history: "When Kenneth Pasmanick asked me to write a concerto for him in 1969, it was more than a chance to write a new work for one of the world's outstanding bassoonists and to be performed by one of the world's outstanding orchestras.
"It was a continuation of a personal and musical friendship that began in 1949 and has continued through the present. Ken performed in the first theater music I ever wrote for productions at Howard University, and we had a group that played chamber music, jazz and free improvisation in Washington. Ken shared with me a love and admiration for jazz, blues and folkloric music, as a vital force in American life. On one of OUI most memorable occasions in the winter of 1952, Charlie Parker visited my basement apartment on Sixteenth street and we played all kinds of music, from Tchaikovsky through jazz composition by Charlie Parker himself. None of us present felt a need to separate music of high spiritual quality and intent. This is what the Bassoon Concerto is about. It combines many musical cultures, folk idioms and moods in a fairly 'conventional' (thought-out and organized) composition.
"The first movement is the most dynamic and complex, using the idioms of jazz, blues, classical - an amalgam of the sounds I love to hear, combined with the picture of Ken that I envisioned in musical terms as I wrote this piece. The second movement is based on a simple progression of chords in the strings, with the horn playing a melody that suggested to me a feeling of old Sephardic music - the Spanish kind of melody later intoned and incanted by the bassoon almost like a prayer . . . Since this is the center of the composition, it is the most expressive and allows the soloist to show not only the amazing flexibility of the bassoon, but its often unheralded power as a singing instrument. The final movement is a Rondino, using near-eastern motifs, with the familiar western melody, 'Good Night Ladies,' sneaking in at the end."