Le monde d’hier

By focusing on the bassoon, an orchestral instrument often confined to pictorial roles and unloved by some romantic composers, Mathieu Lussier, accompanied by Francis Perron, gives pride of place to his instrument by showing its little-known role as a solo instrument in an aesthetic typical of the turn of the 19th century. Far from the clichéd player of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, the bassoonist and his accomplice deliver a performance in which their playing is at once tender, lyrical, intense and expressive, notably with Camille Saint-Saëns’ Bassoon Sonata, the composer’s last work.