At the heart of this concert was Will Duerden, a young double bassist whose developing international career demonstrates how far perceptions of the instrument have changed. Duerden was a winner at the Young Classical Artists Trust Live Final Auditions in 2023, was nominated as a Classic FM Rising Star for 2024, and became a Borletti-Buitoni Fellowship artist in the same year. In 2026 he was selected as a Bowers Program artist for 2027–30 by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City. His appearances have taken him across Britain, continental Europe and Australia, while his chamber-music collaborators have included Lawrence Power, Steven Isserlis, Thomas Adès and Daniel Lebhardt, among others.

At The Glasshouse, however, it was the instrument itself that became the story. Václav Pichl’s Double Bass Concerto No. 1 returned us to the eighteenth-century Classical world. Born in Bohemia in 1741, Pichl belonged to the cosmopolitan musical culture of Central Europe. His concerto was written for the historical Viennese tuning associated with the remarkable flourishing of virtuoso double-bass playing during the eighteenth century. Rather than the modern tuning of the instrument in fourths, this system arranged the strings differently, helping to make resonant chords, arpeggios and agile solo passages particularly effective. That historical detail helps explain something immediately apparent in Pichl’s concerto: the double bass can be stately, lyrical, agile and brilliant. An instrument normally experienced as part of the orchestra’s foundation is brought decisively into the foreground. Pichl reverses the familiar relationship. The supporting voice becomes the principal voice. With Duerden standing before the orchestra, bringing this eighteenth-century writing vividly into the present, the point became wonderfully clear:

the bass does not merely support somebody else’s melody. It possesses a voice of its own.

If Pichl revealed the Classical elegance of the double bass, Giovanni Bottesini showed just how spectacular the instrument could become. Known as the “Paganini of the double bass,” Bottesini transformed nineteenth-century expectations of the instrument. His Capriccio di Bravura of 1858 is music of display, agility and astonishing virtuosity. Bottesini himself became an international celebrity, performing on a Testore double bass famously associated with a marionette theatre and wielding a formidable bow nicknamed “The Devastator.” Behind the colourful biography lies a serious musical achievement. Bottesini demonstrated that an instrument routinely regarded as heavy and cumbersome could sing, leap and astonish. The bass could fly.

With Edgar Meyer, the journey moves into our own time. Born in Tennessee in 1960, Meyer is both composer and bassist, and his musical world refuses to remain within conventional categories. Classical virtuosity encounters bluegrass, folk and American roots traditions. His collaborators have included Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell and Hilary Hahn, and he has done much to establish the double bass as a modern solo and chamber instrument. The concert presented three examples of his work: First Movement, Instrumental and Duet for Cello and Double Bass. Together they allowed the instrument to display rhythmic energy, character and independence. The duet is particularly fascinating because cello and double bass meet as distinct voices. Neither must become the other. They exchange ideas, listen and respond. There is something rather beautiful about that musical relationship: dialogue does not require difference to disappear. Pichl, Bottesini and Meyer belong to very different musical worlds, but together they trace an extraordinary journey for the double bass: from eighteenth-century Classical soloist, through nineteenth-century virtuoso, to contemporary musical collaborator. In the hands of Will Duerden, that history became something immediate and alive. The instrument did not suddenly acquire a voice that evening.

We simply stopped long enough to listen to it.