Klarinet Archive - Posting 001102.txt from 1999/03

From: David Blumberg <reedman@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] re: Bassoon found
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 20:49:27 -0500

Encore! Encore!
Soloist to get bassoon back, 43 years after it was stolen
IT IS A famous story among William Waterhouse's three children, whose bedtimes
often arrived with this parable of their father's youthful folly. It began with
excuses.
That it was a quaint, unassuming village in Germany. That he was young, only
25. That, as bassoons tend to be heavy, he was highly inclined to leave his
prized instrument in his car overnight. And that incidents of theft, at the
time, were not common.
But that night of July 22, 1956, someone broke into Waterhouse's Volkswagen
Beetle and stole his bassoon. Hopeful to the end, Waterhouse kept the search
alive.
Because you never forget your first bassoon.
''You have a very intimate connection with it,'' Waterhouse said, explaining
the enduring union of man and woodwind. ''When you play, it sounds through your
body. The sound of the instrument is a very personal thing.''
All these years, unbeknown to Waterhouse, a former soloist with two major
London orchestras and perhaps the world's leading scholar of the bassoon, his
1930 vintage Heckel bassoon was in and out of the ink- and
peanut-butter-stained hands of three generations of students in the Huntington
School District.
Through an improbable chain of events, Waterhouse, a British citizen who lives
in London, will be reunited with his long-lost bassoon March 19 when he visits
J. Taylor Finley Junior High School to retrieve his instrument, which since
September has rested on the floor of eighth-grader Laura Bell's closet. Laura
used it as her home practice instrument. One day, she was called to the
principal's office, and her imagination spurred fear.
''I thought I was in trouble,'' Bell said. ''I went inside, and he said he had
a funny story to tell me.''
This bassoon, among the finest and most coveted of its kind in the world, worth
about $30,000 in mint condition, played in the great concert halls of Europe
and in orchestras led by conductors such as Arturo Toscanini, now sat without
distinction next to Bell's soccer bag.
It could have been much worse.
''I've always worried,'' Waterhouse said by phone from his home in London,
''that someone, not knowing what it was, would just throw it away.
''Of course I've moved on, but I've never forgotten about it. I'm intrigued not
only to set eyes on it but to discover what it sounds like.''
In gratitude, Waterhouse will perform a concert for the students of Finley and
donate a substantial sum of money to be used toward the purchase of a
replacement instrument. A workable student bassoon would cost between $3,000
and $4,000.
Related to the oboe and English horn, the bassoon, which also has two reeds,
was featured prominently in the theme of the Alfred Hitchcock television show
and the children's musical tale, ''Peter and the Wolf.''
While in playable condition, Waterhouse's bassoon is in need of reconditioning.
Records indicate the bassoon was part of the school district's inventory when
the music program was formally established in 1962. No one knows when and from
whom the district purchased the bassoon.
Joan Fretz, music director for the school district, said it usually buys used
instruments from a wholesale distributor. From time to time, this bassoon's
vintage and quality would snare someone's attention. Last year when Andy Wight
began his job as Finley's music teacher, he wondered to himself how his school
came into possession of a German-made, pre-war Heckel, the Steinway of
bassoons.
''I just figured we picked it up somewhere,'' he said.
In fact, the Huntington schools are quite proud of their music curriculum and
frequently invest in high-quality instruments. For instance, Huntington High
School possesses a refurbished Steinway grand piano worth more than $50,000,
Fretz said.
The wink and the nod that likely accompanied the bassoon's first post-theft
transaction probably occured long before it arrived on Long Island. Its journey
across the Atlantic may forever remain a mystery. Rufus Kern, a longtime
district music director who might have been able to account for the bassoon's
provenance, died in 1997.
For more than three years, a knowledgable few have known of the bassoon's
origins, but intimidated by circumstances, did not come forward with the
information until last fall.
The mystery first saw light in a repair studio in Port Washington, where Cindy
Lauda began working on the worn but obviously valuable school instrument four
to five years ago, she said. Guessing her friend Louis Nolemi, a Staten Island
longshoreman and free-lance bassoonist, might be curious, she called him with a
description and its serial number: 7466.
A connoisseur of vintage bassoons, he heard something familiar in the string of
numbers.
As a courtesy to musicians and its members, the International Double Reed
Society publishes a running list of stolen oboes and bassoons in its journal.
Waterhouse's stolen Heckel had found what seemed to be a permanent place on the
top of the list. Nolemi regularly read the journal and almost immediately
recognized the Waterhouse bassoon.
But he delayed taking action as a courtesy to his friend Lauda, reluctant to
insert herself into a potentially contentious situation.
''I didn't know what to do with this information,'' said Lauda, an employee of
the company that agreed to repair the school's instrument. ''To be honest, I
was so fresh in the business I didn't know what to do. It didn't seem like a
big deal at the time.''
She returned the instrument without mentioning her discovery. As years passed
and accounts with the school closed, she thought it harmless to release the
information. Nolemi contacted a friend and colleague, Jim Kopp, also a bassoon
player and historian, who knew Waterhouse personally.
''Dear Bill: I'm writing with some startling news . . . '' began the letter
Kopp quickly sent to London.
''I'm absolutely gobsmacked . . .'' began the reply, left on Kopp's answering
machine in Hoboken, N.J. Loosely translated, it means, if struck by a feather,
I'd fall to the floor.
Waterhouse wrote Craig Springer, the principal at Finley, expressing his
desperate desire to reassume ownership of his lost instrument, documenting, in
several ways, proof of his fantastic story.
He included photographs of himself as a young man holding the instrument, and
decades-old correspondence between him and the German police. He did not need
to try so hard, as the school was easily convinced and happy to return the
bassoon.
''This is very sentimental, very emotional,'' said Kevin Colpys, superintendent
of Huntington schools. ''It's kind of a life story, to have searched this
long.''
Waterhouse was 15 when he purchased the bassoon from his teacher in September,
1946, paying 85 pounds.
The Sunday morning he awakened to find it stolen was ''the worst of my life,''
he said. ''I was at the police station, feeling such a fool.''
He went on to perform as soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra and the BBC
Symphony Orchestra. He lectured and wrote books on the history of the
instrument and built one of the world's largest collections of historic
bassoons, some more than 200 years old. But it was the memory of his first
bassoon that he could not let go.
For years, he regretted never insuring the instrument. But yesterday in London,
he celebrated it.
''I came to terms with it, but I always kicked myself, considering its value,
for neglecting to insure it,'' Waterhouse said. ''But now it belongs to me, not
to an insurance company.''

-----------------------------

That is the article that I sent a link to on 3-2. The article was changed the
next day to that days news. Interesting reading.

David Blumberg - MTA for Woodwind Players (200+ pieces, Playable Demos -
G2, MP3's)
play it@-----.com
http://www.mytempo.com
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