Alban Wesly

The beginnings are still easy to trace. Alban Wesly (born in Amsterdam in 1967) was brought to the bassoon by a big brother who had reserved the oboe for himself, and he came to contemporary music through HK Gruber's “Frankenstein!!” at the age of twelve.

It is a nice coincidence that he met up again with this work and its composer in the autumn of 2000 as a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik. Admittedly, coincidences like these are not all that rare if, like Alban Wesly, a musician likes to see music from the perspective of its composers and thus tries to establish a process of exchange with them. “Working together with composers of our day and age results in a changed attitude to music – to new music, but also to music from the past. By learning how a composer thinks, you learn to look inside the music, to search for its essence, and to find ways of expressing this essence in an interpretation.”

In 1985, Wesly founded the woodwind ensemble Calefax (consisting only of reed instruments) with some school friends. He has since given more than 200 concerts and recorded six CDs with this group, in the varied capacities of bassoonist, composer and arranger. In 1997, the ensemble was presented with the Phillip Morris Finest Selection Award. Since 2008 Alban Wesly is also Member of David Kweksilber Big Band.

As of June 2017