Vienna Philharmonic's Principal Bassoon Picks Up the Baton

Sophie Dervaux, principal bassoon of the Vienna Philharmonic since 2015, has added a new line to her biography: conductor. A newly circulated video shows her leading the Silesian Philharmonic in Katowice — and playing Mozart while she does it.

The work in question is a Mozart concerto, with Dervaux directing from her instrument. The performance, reported by Slippedisc, has drawn a blunt two-word verdict from the site: "Impressive and highly musical."

That judgment lands with weight, because the feat itself is genuinely difficult. Conducting a concerto from the soloist's chair demands that one musician serve two functions at once. The player must shape the orchestral texture through gesture and eye contact in rests and breathing spaces, then return instantly to full command of a solo line that allows no margin for error. With a bassoon — an instrument that rewards neither carelessness nor divided attention — the balancing act becomes steeper still.

Dervaux brings an unusually deep bench of experience to it. She has held the principal bassoon chair of the Vienna Philharmonic since 2015, a position she secured at a strikingly early stage of her career and one that places her at the center of one of the world's most scrutinized orchestras. Her section sits at the heart of the Viennese wind tradition, a sound cultivated over the ensemble's long history and identified by critics and audiences worldwide.

The Katowice appearance adds a conducting credit to that record. The Silesian Philharmonic, one of Poland's established symphonic institutions, provided the platform for the double duty, and the video of the performance is now circulating online for viewers to assess for themselves. Slippedisc's recommendation, characteristically terse, was simply: "Just watch."

For the Vienna Philharmonic's principal bassoon, the move signals an ambition beyond the chair she has occupied for roughly a decade. Whether conducting becomes a parallel career or a selective supplement to her orchestral work remains to be seen; orchestras increasingly program artist-crossover events of exactly this kind, and soloists who direct Mozart and Haydn from the instrument have a long precedent on period and modern stages alike.

What the video documents, at minimum, is a musician testing the boundaries of her job description. A principal player in one of the world's great ensembles, performing a Mozart concerto while shaping the ensemble around her — that is the concrete fact on the screen, and it is enough to explain why the footage is traveling. Whether Dervaux takes the podium again, and on what repertoire, will be the question her next season answers.