Author: oboesax
Date: 2012-05-22 12:59
Interesting question. Oboe players are certainly capable technically of playing harder pieces/work than they are usually asked to play, as the previous post demonstrates.
My 16-year old daughter plays both oboe and alto sax, and it's interesting to compare the differences. She'll enter concerto competitions on both instruments, and win 9 out of 10 of them on oboe. On oboe, they always require something easy, like the Haydn oboe concerto (which she is sick of), but on saxophone there are some 100 concertos to choose from, some of them very difficult. At one national-level competition, she decided the day before the deadline to record the Haydn concerto, which she had never played before. She played it through twice, recorded it, and eventually won on it. She could never have done something like that on saxophone, which requires far more study.
At a prestigious summer institute last year, my daughter was told off for playing the Strauss Oboe concerto, which as many of you know is more difficult than the oboe baroque/classical works. Even though she'd performed it before, she was told (by a "top" oboe US professional) that she needed to concentrate on playing through all of the baroque and classical literature first. With that attitude directing much of the oboe study in America, no wonder youth aren't performing or studying the more technical oboe works available.
That attitude has helped direct my daughter more towards the saxophone (classical), where students are encouraged to work on very difficult and rewarding pieces.
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