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Music open thread: Oboe concertos [1]
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Date: 2025-01-13
Continuing my survey of concertos, looking to highlight music by composers undeservedly obscure for reasons other than musical merit, and to highlight talented diverse performers. Expect to see these open threads Tuesday at the latest each week, until I get to the double bass.
I started last week with the flute, now I move on to the oboe. The oboe has a reputation for being a difficult instrument. From my firsthand experience, however, I found the oboe to be much easier than the saxophone, the clarinet and the bassoon. At least at the beginner level. I don’t know how I would have fared if I had tried to go further.
I didn’t get anywhere to the level of José Luis García Vegara, in this video playing the Oboe Concerto by Bohuslav Martinů with the Frankfurt Symphony conducted by Ruth Reinhardt.
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Today, Antonio Vivaldi is famous almost entirely for the Four Seasons, a group of four violin concerti. And he wrote a lot of other concerti for violin, but also quite a few for other instruments, like this exciting one for the oboe.
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Johann Sebastian Bach also wrote an oboe concerto.
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English horn concertos
There’s a theory that the English horn was actually meant to be called “angled horn.” The instrument is a lot like the oboe, but the reed is placed on a bocal that is angled, so the reed and the main wind column are not on a straight line. The written range and fingerings are almost the same as the oboe’s, but the English horn sounds a perfect fifth lower. The sound quality is generally much more melancholy than the oboe.
Bernard Hoffer’s English Horn Concerto is much more cheerful than one would expect. I couldn’t find a recording of it on YouTube. I’ve listened to this concerto by Pēteris Vasks a few times, it hasn’t quite made much of an impression on me yet.
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Oboe d’amore concertos
The oboe d’amore has never been as popular as it was during its infancy in the Baroque. So Johann Sebastian Bach is perhaps the best known author of a concerto for that instrument.
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Christopher Tyler Nickel wrote a concerto for the instrument in 2014. I believe there’s only one recording of it so far, it comes on an album that also includes his concertos for oboe and bass oboe.
Bass oboe concertos
Some dispute that the bass oboe should be called that, arguing that it would be more precise to call it a baritone oboe. Christopher Tyler Nickel is the only composer I’m aware of to have written a concerto for it. As a matter of fact, I found out about Nickel only because of my search for bass oboe concertos. I highly recommend it. You might find it on YouTube with the album cover for the entire duration of the video track.
Guntram Wolf invented the lupophone, an instrument with a stronger claim to being called a bass oboe. To my knowledge, no one has ever written a concerto for it.
The open thread question: what’s your favorite music with a solo for oboe, English horn, oboe d’amore or bass oboe?
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