Bassoonist Rebekah Heller Builds a Choir on Righteous Rage

Rebekah Heller has spent years expanding the bassoon’s solo vocabulary, consistently commissioning work that treats the instrument as a voice rather than a supporting texture. On Righteous Rage, she pushes that idea further: the album is built from a bassoon choir, a layered self-sufficiency first explored on her 2017 solo debut Metafagote.

For that record, composer Felipe Lara had Heller pre-record six bassoon lines, creating a dense mass above which her lead line soared. The sensation of overtones interacting led her to develop a repertoire written for multiple bassoons, performed live by a rotating cast of players but here executed entirely by Heller herself. Two arrangements of works originally for cello choirs open the album. Julius Eastman’s 1981 The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc translates its contrapuntal fury into a web of low-end riffing and gauzy, sorrowful melody. Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint becomes “Grand Street Counterpoint,” named for the Lower East Side street where both Heller and Reich live. Reich co-produced the recording; its rhythmic precision offers a calm counterweight to Eastman’s intensity.

The rest of the program comprises new commissions. Jessie Cox’s “Sonic Cartographies” employs microtonality and dense multiphonics for a taut, ominous effect. Fay Victor wrote “Nurture (for Ingram)” as a tribute to jazz musician Ingram Washington, moving between marbled drones and ebullient polyrhythms. Brittany J. Green’s title piece closes the album, balancing fury with a layered response to systemic degradation. Throughout, Heller treats the bassoon less as a unique timbre and more as a flexible, self-contained ensemble, one capable of producing its own conflicted harmony.