The last time I saw Ben Hoadley on stage, he was performing with period orchestra NZ Barok. I was mesmerised by the instrument he was playing, which, he says now, was a baroque bassoon. It looked like he was blowing directly into a tree, an instrument less crafted than hewn. And it sounded like it was in search of a forest – woody and resonant and just a little bit yearning in a way that made you think it might be lost but didn’t want you to know.
The baroque concert was a contrast to the first time I saw him, in the early 2010s. Back then, Hoadley, a Kiwi who jumps between here and Australia, was involved in a composers’ workshop with Auckland Philharmonia. His music is still in demand, with forthcoming performances of his work by Melbourne group the Flinders Quartet. He has also recently been accepted into the Australian Composers School, a two-year programme run by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.
It used to be considered improper to both write and play, he says. “When I was going through music school in the 90s, they said you should do one thing and do it well, but now I see a lot of composer-performers who are at a high level.”
Hoadley still says he’s a bassoonist who composes, rather than a composer who plays bassoon. In a concert performing Monteverdi’s Vespers with the Tudor Consort in Wellington, he’ll be a composer who plays the dulcian.
The dulcian is a relative of the baroque bassoon but somehow even more arboreal. Instead of keys, holes are drilled into the instrument, like a recorder. It’s not the sort of thing a modern bassoonist can just pick up and play. “It takes a couple of years until you sound decent. It’s a bit volatile.”
Hoadley did his time not sounding decent as a student at the New England Conservatory in Boston. The city is one of the great centres of period instrument performance. “Most of my electives were in early music, things like Renaissance improvisation, and I did a course for people who played modern bassoon but wanted to learn baroque. It was fabulous.”
Monteverdi’s Vespers (more properly Vespro della Beata Vergine), was published in 1610 and straddles two musical eras. As a result, it’s both the last great sacred work of the Renaissance and the first sacred masterpiece of the baroque.
Hoadley has played it before but never on a period instrument. There’s not much in it for him in terms of solos, but the dulcian has an important role in supporting the lower end of the choir.
“I think it’s the perfect bass instrument,” Hoadley says. “It does everything you want, and [in the Vespers] there’s no actual written part for it, so you sort of go where you’re needed.”
The Tudor Consort, Monteverdi’s Vespers, St Mary of the Angels, Wellington, Saturday, September 13.
