F. Keyper: Romance Et Rondo: Kontrabass Solo

An easy virtuoso work published here for the first time and now much performed. Recorded Slatford/Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields (EMI). AMEB (Australian Syllabus) 2004. Orchestral material on hire from Yorke Edition (notSpartan).

Programme Note:

As a young professional player in the 1960s, my work as a double bassist with chamber ensembles and small orchestras took me all over the world. This presented an unparalleledopportunity to scour libraries and archives wherever I went. Long before the advent of the photocopier and e-mail, research was far more challenging than it is today. Eastern Europe was particularly difficult to access, withmanycollections kept under lock and key for all but a few hours a week. One quickly found colleagues who were keen to share information gleaned in passing, even though they had no specific interest in one's own particularspecialism (it is so often the peripheral topics that fascinate as much as the main subject under investigation, and one can quickly be side-tracked into political and social issues that have only slender bearing on the job inhand!).

In the early 1970s James Brown, the then sub-principal oboist of the English Chamber Orchestra with whom I was working at the time, stumbled across a small collection of double bass manuscripts at the RoyalDanish State Library in Copenhagen. They were by Franz Anton Leopold Keÿper (b. c.1756, d. Copenhagen 7 June 1815), a double bassist of Dutch origin who worked as principal of the Royal Chapel Orchestra in Copenhagen.Keÿper's son was the bassoonist Franz Jacob August Keÿper (1792-1859). The collection included a number of concertos, some chamber music, and various naïve fragments. Although hardly the work of a Mozart or Haydn,the style is characteristic of the period. For an instrument such as the double bass, whose 18th century solo repertoire is largely written for tunings that are no longer in everyday use, Keÿper's music is easily approachablein its