I have been trying to locate recordings of the Capuzzi Concerto for my students for a long time. Since it is considered a student piece, there aren’t really any professional recordings of it.
YouTube is a real boon for student pieces. I really hope that more pieces like the Capuzzi get put up on YouTube–it’s an easy and useful way to let students get an idea of how such music flows.
This is a recording of a 16 year old Swedish bassist playing the first movement of the Capuzzi Concerto with either her high school orchestra or her youth orchestra. The bass is somewhat hard to hear, but she plays the piece well. It’s a youth orchestra, so expect some intonation and ensemble fuzziness, but it is definitely worth checking out for people looking to hear a performance of this piece.
Check out how long the orchestral introduction really is (!), and check out her cadenza at the end of the piece:
Related Posts:
- Capuzzi with piano – video
- Student performance of Bottesini Concerto – video
- Vito Viuzzi plays music by Nino Rota – video
- Bogdon Box Bass and regular bass duel – video
- Dragonetti Concerto mvt 1 – video
Bass News Right To Your Inbox!
Subscribe to get our weekly newsletter covering the double bass world.
I know of a couple recordings of the piece on CD. There is one by Lucas Drew and one my Mark Morton on his “Thresholds” CD. I think both are in F.
-TA
Interesting cadenza, and a neat performance. Now I feel inspired to perform this concerto myself.
I totally concur, Jason, about YouTube being a great and extremely useful resource! But, the truth be told, it’s much nicer watching those clips by way of your blog – it spares me the pain of reading the embarrassing comments that so many people feel compelled to post on YouTube. Way too many of them must either come from envious but sublimely inarticulate high school kids without too much knowledge about the music in question, or they offer nothing but a bunch of second-hand truisms (on intonation or fingerings, mostly) that can’t really be called helpful advice.
As for this performance, I must honestly admit that I envy the young lady a little bit for having had the opportunity (and deservedly so!) of performing Capuzzi with a full orchestra at such a young age. I don’t think I would’ve lived up to the task at age 16. She seems to know the piece pretty well, her performance is remarkably self-assured and her overall understanding of the style is also fairly impressive. „Good elocution“, so to speak. The orchestra – well, fair enough, there are some insecurities, but the recording conditions don’t seem to have been what I would call favorable. If it’s true that they had only one week’s rehearsal time (and, I assume, more repertoire to work on than Capuzzi only), there’s no point in throwing any stones at them.
A few thoughts on the concerto itself: Sure enough, it’s not exactly a milestone in music history (but let’s face it, the same holds true for most of our solo repertoire). I wouldn’t belittle its value to that of an inconsequential student piece. It’s a nice, straightforward, „pretty“ affair, to be sure, dating from a period when composers could begin to think of making a little extra money by writing music (commissioned or not) for dedicated amateurs – which is, as far as I know, precisely what Capuzzi did here. Back then, a capable soloist was always welcome to improvise and elaborate on the written text. In my opinion, that’s the one great invitation hidden in the concertos by Capuzzi and some of his contemporaries: Do something with it! If you have that extra bit of technique, why not take some of the passages up an octave? If you know the style well enough, why not add a little embellishment here or there? The two fast movements in particular offer any number of apparently rather shallow scale runs and arpeggios (just think of the Minore section of the Rondo!) – don’t they conjure up a vision of the composer saying, through some unspoken and now-forgotten code: „Well, that’s the basic idea, but you might just as well let it rip here“?
Do I sound like I’m exaggerating? Well, consider your reactions when you heard that Swedish student play a cadenza different from the one(s) we’re all used to – for us it’s a stunning musical effect, but that’s exactly the effect intended by the composers of early classical music. Suprise, create interest, demonstrate a bit of showmanship as well as your personal approach to any given piece. This young lady did it all in an instant. I don’t know who made it up, maybe she (or her teacher) worked out this cadenza for the occasion, but the fact of the matter is: It can be done easily, provided that all our theory lessons had some good at all ;-). The various editions of the Hoffmeister Concerto (Nr. 1) now available provide a lot of insight as to how a text can be interpreted, but Capuzzi with his extremely clear harmonic, melodic and formal layout is exactly the type of piece to start working on the subject on your own – or with your student.
Thanks for the great comment, Rainer! I also agree that it is better than its ‘student piece’ reputation. It is fun to see these recordings surface, and I think you’ll enjoy the other version of Capuzzi that I’ll be posting soon!
I haven’t seen the music for the cadenza myself. Anyone out there have it? Let me know!
hey, i’m 15 i’ll be playin this in an audition in a few months. And to all of you, the cadenza is not written out, you write your own……and boy….that’ll be a nice challenge. Wish me luck.
Matt – you CAN write your own cadenza, but you’re also welcome to use one which has already been written and used. In fact, many concertos come with printed cadenzas (the cadenza usually varies with the edition of the piece) which are often used in concerts and would certainly be adequate for an audition – unfortunately the Capuzzi doesn’t as far as I know, but you can definitely find pre-written cadenzas (I just found one at http://maccfiwge.info/2011/cadenza-for-capuzzi-concerto-for-double-bass-tatb/ if you’re interested, I’m playing it for an audition too) – you can even use the one this Swedish girl in the clip played if you’re willing to copy down all the notes she plays by ear or somehow track down a written copy. The idea of a cadenza is that it’s the soloist playing with and elaborating on the material they’ve presented so far in the movement, and sounds sort of improvised but isn’t (as you know), and this can be achieved by writing your own OR playing one written by someone else. Good luck in your audition 🙂
EDIT the address I gave in my last comment is the exact cadenza used in this video, I think.