Belgian double bassist David Desimpelaere and his pianist brother Erik Desimpelaere perform Grieg’s Sonata in A minor op.36, in their arrangement for double bass.
David Desimpelaere has been exploring how to transcribe Grieg’s cello sonata for double bass over the last few years, while staying as close as possible to the original cello part. In his May 2024 Technique feature in The Strad, where he discussed creative fingering for double bassists, Desimpelaere said his brother’s compositions have challenged him to think more deeply about effective and expressive fingering.
’When I return to standard bass repertoire, I find that many of the solutions I have devised for his music are useful in this context too,’ he said.
’Historically the bass has not habitually been considered a solo instrument, partly because of its register and partly because the distances we have to cover are huge. So, do we go for big shifts on one string as has been customary, or do we play higher up the fingerboard where the distances between the fingers are smaller?’
Desimpelaere is the principal bass of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and professor of double bass at the Lucerne School of Music and Ghent School of Arts. He studied with Rinat Ibragimov at London’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Božo Paradžik at the Freiburg School of Music and Frank Coppieters at the Brussels Conservatory of Music.
He performs on modern basses by Marco Nolli (Cremona) and Derek High (Schotland/Reutlingen), and uses a new bow made by Adriano Massari (Bologna).
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