Artistic Director

Dancing with a grumpy old lady

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:18:00 +0000

Article from The Australian by Leta Keens, published 5 March 2010.

"SHE'S a grumpy old lady; I've had her for 10 years and she's still giving me trouble."

Maxime Bibeau, principal double bass with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, is talking about his instrument, made about 1820 in England, but by whom he's not sure.

"Quite a few from that era came to Australia," he says. "This one's rather large and not always easy to play, is quite sensitive to humidity and change, and reacts quickly, which is part of the reason it sounds good."

From next week, Australian audiences will have a chance to fully experience that sound when Bibeau steps out from his usual position at the back of the ACO, where he "underpins the harmony and provides the rhythm section", for the premiere of Matthew Hindson's Crime and Punishment. A work with funk influences for double bass and string orchestra, it's a piece that the composer says places "extremely strenuous demands" on the soloist, but ones that Hindson is sure he's up to.

"Max is such a great player," Hindson says.

"There's his extreme technical facility, but he also has an ability to play a melodic line as expressively as any cellist. He has a very high level of musicianship."

Bibeau, 37, says there are "a few hairy moments" in the first solo piece written for him as a professional. "This is a big deal, obviously. It's a lot more demanding being out there, exposed."

And trying to compete with other, brighter instruments, such as the violin, playing similar notes. "Normally, I'm an octave below the cello, two or three octaves below the violins. I'm king of that area, no one bothers me. With this, the type of sound you have to make is slightly different to cut through the other instruments."

Bibeau, who also lectures in double bass at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, likens the concert, Five Concertos, in which the orchestra's principals act as soloists, to a jazz session rather than the usual classical concert.

"In the jazz world, members of the band -- piano, guitar, whatever -- have a solo and everyone loves it. In the classical world, it's not the way things are. You get the soloist, and the orchestra acts as back-up band."

t was jazz that led Bibeau, reared in the small French-speaking farming town of Warwick in Quebec, to learn an instrument in the first place. The son of a barber and a bank clerk, he didn't hear much music at home and was more into sport than anything else. "Hockey, baseball, softball, volleyball: I was busy every night."

He started listening to jazz on the radio and says he wanted to "copy the great solos".

After starting on keyboard at 12, he moved on to tenor sax and electric bass, and eventually, at 17, to double bass.

Asked its appeal, he says: "It's the sound of it, the way it makes everything around it vibrate, the fact you can't control it, that it's so big you virtually have to dance with it, body to body. When you play it standing up, you're leaning on each other. I like that."

Needing to develop his technique on the instrument, Bibeau took lessons with a classical teacher and discovered he enjoyed the organised approach, "the way you follow things and build up your abilities, step by step.

"There is such a thing in jazz but I hadn't encountered it."

Although he quickly became competent -- "I like to think it's more natural than other instruments, you don't need to twist the body from the age of four" -- he didn't see music as a career option.

"I was going to help save the world and was looking at environmental chemical engineering or biochemistry," he says. "I thought music was extremely selfish but loved it."

Accepted into biochemistry at Montreal's McGill University and music at the Conservatoire de Musique de Quebec a Montreal, Bibeau decided to take up music for a year or two and, if it didn't work out, go back to science.

"I've still got my letters of acceptance [to McGill] but haven't had to use them yet."

Following studies in Canada, he received scholarships and grants to study for a masters of music at Rice University in Houston with Timothy Pitts and Paul Ellison. "The level of students was extremely high," he says. "We kept pushing each other."

It was, in fact, "a bunch of Australian friends at university" who convinced him to audition with the ACO during the orchestra's 1998 US tour.

"I hadn't heard of them but they sounded pretty exciting," he says. "I saw their concert at Carnegie Hall the night before my audition and felt inspired."

Two weeks later he was in Sydney, playing a Beethoven arrangement with the ACO.

"It was right up my alley," he says. "I'd spent so many evenings reading string quartets with friends, tagging along and playing part of the cello part."

He thought it unfair that double bass didn't have the repertoire, so he did what he could to add the instrument to various pieces, "getting familiar with the writing of specific composers, the colours and techniques they used, trying to imagine what it would be like if they did have the double bass".

Bibeau, who swims at Bondi Icebergs pool "to keep everything in place" and rides his bike and scuba dives when he can, didn't imagine he'd be with the ACO for more than two or three years.

"Australia seemed pretty far, and it was my first job," he says.

He wasn't sure about Sydney either: "It took me a little longer to get used to it because [with touring] I wasn't here for at least four months a year. Now, though, I make the most of it and try not to be away too much."

Even now Bibeau, who has performed with other orchestras including the Montreal Symphony and WDR Symphony in Cologne, regularly reassesses himself to make sure he's progressing. "We're luckier than ballet dancers, whose careers don't go much past their 30s," he says. "We manage to dance a little longer. What I do encompasses so many things and that's why I love it so much: the physical connection with the instrument, I'm working with people, it's creative."

And when he does eventually retire, he says, he may go back to jazz. "My hands know where to go, I just need my brain to work in a different way."

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