This joyous new disc takes us deep into the wondrous world of ‘all-things bassoon’—original pieces, arrangements time-tested and well loved, and new versions for the instrument of old favourites.

Longfellow described the bassoon as ‘a distant voice in the darkness’—Laurence Perkins takes up the challenge in his arrangements of wordless songs by Fauré and Ravel; folk song finds its place—a nod to the instrument’s distinguished ancestry dating all the way back to the medieval period; and humour, of course, is never far away—the bassoon is after all (to paraphrase Ashlyn’s bizarre dialogue between voice and bassoon) an instrument as much suited to the innuendo-laden serenading of one’s lover as to the killing of rodents …