Oboe Solos

Bohemian born Josef Fiala (1748-1816) was renowned as an oboist, receiving a letter of recommendation from none other than Leopold Mozart. So it is no surprise that his compositions often favor that wind instrument, including the two quartets on this recording. Both follow a four movement structure, each a minuet in a different sequence. In the opening ‘Allegro spirituoso’ of the F Major Quartet, the oboe immediately grabs the spotlight and never lets go. With a faint violin as an echo, the solo wind drives this relentlessly charming 1st movement through a brief minor keyed interlude and solo passages brimming with triplets.

As a glance at the titles for this release indicates, this is pretty much an album of reconstructions. In his learned and usefully comprehensive booklet notes, Geoffrey Burgess describes how Bach’s concertos for harpsichord can be shown to have had other intended solo instruments, the oboe in particular, in mind. Bach wrote more solos for the oboe into his cantatas than for any other instrument, and so the lack of concertante works for the instrument argues that several may have been lost or have only survived in other guises.

Eric Montalbetti has had a long and fulfilling music career, though not necessarily in the field of composition. He is most known for his 18 year tenure as Artistic director of the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. However, he began composing as a young child and has continued throughout his whole life. Montalbetti writes of this project: Today, I am most happy to see my scores taking life thanks to wonderful conductors and soloists, and to develop new composition projects for the future. In this music one can hear all of our most varied emotions- energy, mourning, hope, love, rage, and gratitude. Notable works on this release include Trois etudes pares Kandinsky for piano, and Esprit tendre, for oboe, which is a tribute to Helen and Elliott Carter. These works are performed by some of the best soloists in the current French music scene.

This album is devoted to Handel's concertante music for solo oboe, of which only a few concertos have survived. He was particularly fond of the instrument and assigned many solos to it in his oratorios, operas, concerti grossi and sonatas. He is even reported to have said of his early oboe works: 'I used to write like the D-v [Devil] in those days, but chiefly for the oboe, which was my favourite instrument.'

Jumping from Mozart on Deutsche Grammophon to Bach on Decca, oboist Albrecht Mayer continues to explore transcriptions as well as works originally for his instrument on Voices of Bach. This is a good and necessary thing since neither Mozart nor Bach wrote a sufficient number of works for the oboe to fill out a single disc. In the case of Bach, Mayer has hit on the ingenious solution of including not just Bach's canonical Oboe Concerto, plus his concertos for oboe d'amore and English horn, but also eight arrangements of well-known chorales for chorus and oboe.

Something of Vagn Holmboe's approach to writing concertos may be discerned in his numeration: they are not grouped according to the solo instrument (e.g., Piano Concerto No. 1), but counted merely as Concertos in the sequence of their composition, regardless of the featured instruments. This suggests that the soloist's role is somewhat altered: still central as a leading part, but frequently incorporated into the orchestral mass as a coloristic instrument among many others. The Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra, Op. 17 (1939), clearly demonstrates Holmboe's procedure, for the piano switches back and forth between lyrical solos and more emphatically rhythmic passages as a percussion instrument. Holmboe's Concerto No. 3 for clarinet and orchestra, Op. 21 (1940-1942), also presents interesting mixtures of the instrument's distinctive tone with other timbres, most strikingly with the brass section. The Concerto No. 7 for oboe and orchestra, Op. 37 (1944-1945), is most beguiling in the many chamber-like, concertino combinations of the oboe with other woodwinds. Pianist Noriko Ogawa, clarinetist Martin Frost, and oboist Gordon Hunt strike the right balance with conductor Owain Arwel Hughes and the Ålborg Symphony Orchestra, since all give prominence to the leading part where Holmboe indicates, but equal attention to the ever-shifting background textures.

This recording is part of the Naïve label's Vivaldi Edition, a complete recording, scheduled to run to 100 discs, of a trove of Vivaldi manuscripts unearthed at the library of the National University of Turin. The recordings have been divided up among various mostly young Italian Baroque interpreters, with a pleasing variety of approaches.