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Taking things from elsewhere.

Article Excerpt
The bassoon is still often stereotyped as an accompanying instrument. Yet there are already performers able to fill an entire concert just with solo pieces for bassoon. We would like to introduce the opinions and experiences of the talented young Czech bassoonist Vaclav Vonasek, who has not been content to keep to the area traditionally assigned to the bassoon but makes audacious excursions into music written for other instruments and into the music of contemporary composers.

You are well-known for your efforts to promote the bassoon as a solo instrument, but I would still like to ask whether you have ever been tempted by another instrument?

Tempted ... I don't know if that's the right way of putting it. I applied to the conservatory as a clarinettist, and they accepted me on condition I studied bassoon, and so I thought--"well, if that's the way it is, let's make it worthwhile!" I was well aware that as a beginner I would have to catch up to get to the level of the others--and unfortunately that almost unhealthy tempo of work has stayed with me. But to return to your question--maybe the soprano sax. I've always really liked it ...

You have had the chance to study at home and abroad. What appealed to you there?

In London I had two professors, one Italian and the other English. I was delighted to be able to work with an Italian teacher! He took me through the Weber Concerto, which to be brutally frank is actually worn round the edges, but he showed me how I ought to step on to the podium and show people "Here I am, I've come to play to you!" and he told me what kind of attitude to take, and in the end made an operatic entrance of the whole thing.

So there was a lot of work with the player's personality, as it were?

Yes, not just the notes--"play it long like this here, give it more here". That's the way teaching often goes in this country and perhaps that's a pity. In this country we work mainly on solo material. In London they devote a lot of attention to work in an orchestra, really honest study of the materials, orchestral parts and even preparing students for the possibility that they won't be having an active music career, and they do other things besides just study an instrument. If I didn't make a living by performing, I wouldn't have the skills for anything else.

Are you happy to hear and adopt new opinions?

Certainly. I can't understand some people who study at the conservatory with one professor and then carry on studying with him at the Academy. It means they are imprisoned in just one limited perspective.

You have had a lot of successes at prestigious competitions. Do you get a lot of invitations to perform as a result?

In most cases no. Those competitions for wind instruments aren't like the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels for example, which I think is for piano, violin and singers, where the winner gets a contract with an agency and a recording company and basically already has it made. Most wind competitions don't have that sort of impact. It was only when I won 2nd Prize at the Prague Spring Competition that I then received offers from our orchestras that had contracts with the Prague Spring Festival, and to be brutal, actually had an obligation to invite a winner to perform. But that didn't mean that anything more permanent came out of it. No, it's not something you can count on. For that I would have to get a prize at the ARD in Munich. That's something comparable with the big competitions for violinists and pianists. There the winner definitely gets noticed by an agent or a recording company and they will offer him or her something. And then one thing leads to another, and the contacts are already there. So competitions are actually sometimes rather deceptive.

So you don't think that a career can be built on competitions?

Often you come home from a competition with the feeling that it was somehow unfair...

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