Bottesini: Concerto for Double Bass No. 2 in B Minor

Giovanni Bottesini (1821-1889) may not be on your short list of composers to explore. I confess that I knew little about him. His name didn’t appear on a single music history test throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies.

But if you are a bass player, you probably know Bottesini. He has been dubbed “the Paganini of the bass”—Paganini being the famous 19th-century violinist whose performances and compositions set the standard for virtuosity. (Professor Carol devotes significant attention to Paganini in Unit 12 of Discovering Music, which discusses virtuosity and the rise of superstar performers in the 19th century.)

But here we are just 20 weeks into this series of posts on listening, and I’m dredging up relatively obscure composers before doing a single thing on Beethoven or Mozart. I’m even putting Bottesini before Paganini. What gives? Shouldn’t a blog on Classical Music focus primarily on the “great masters”?

My answer to that is obviously “no.” We have done some of the big names, and we will do more, but getting to know music is not about studying famous people. It’s about learning the forms, and the styles, and the genres. And it’s about enjoying the process of discovering new things.

This Bottesini concerto is rather short: roughly 14 minutes for all three movements. It’s worth listening to all of it. It has immediately appealing lyrical melodies. Bottesini composed numerous operas, and you find the kind of lyricism that characterized Italian opera of the time. Bottesini also gained renown as an opera conductor and was chosen by Verdi to conduct the premiere of Aida. I was particularly interested in the reports that he frequently took the stage during intermissions at the opera to play fantasies on the opera’s themes. Intermissions were often far more elaborate than they are now.

The concerto, written for solo bass and orchestra, is performed here with piano. The bassist, Rinat Ibragimov, is playing a three-stringed period instrument. Notice also that he uses the French style of bowing, something that Bottesini pioneered. In most orchestras today, you will some players using this French style and others using the German style.