Author: huboboe
Date: 2010-10-02 19:30
I just ran across this in my archives:
-----------------------------------
http://www.aspendailynews.com/section/home/135656
Woodhams to perform under the Benedict Music Tent
by David Bentley
Friday, July 17, 2009
This coming Sunday, Richard Woodhams will be performing the Concerto for Solo Oboe (2004) by Christopher Rouse. Woodhams has held the chair of principal oboe for the Philadelphia Orchestra since 1977. During the 2005 Asian tour of the Philadelphia Orchestra, he alternated as headliner with the bravura pianist Lang Lang, who is also a Curtis graduate.
Since 1985, Woodhams has been professor of oboe at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, which is one of the smallest and most exclusive music conservatories in the world. Many of his former students now occupy first chairs of oboe and cor anglaise (the alto version of the oboe) with major orchestras.
He has been an artist/faculty member of the Aspen Music Festival since 2000.
His master classes at Classroom 1 at the Castle Creek Campus are a delight to watch. He combines gentility with a wry sense of humor. He carries that attitude into his private life, too. At the front door of his house in Philadelphia, there is a sign that says: “Anyone caught stealing my Sunday New York Times will be dealt with harshly.”
Classical music, also known as “art music” is first and foremost a series of experiments by composers to extend the experience of the sense of hearing.
Our elementary sense of space includes the dimensions of length, width and height.
Musical ideas are classified as rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, chromatic or textural and in many compositions, they are expressed all together in the same metronomic time. For these ideas to work together, tones must be produced with pinpoint accuracy by a hundred different instruments.
Woodhams
Woodhams entered Curtis at age 16. Blessed with perfect pitch and spectacular musical gifts, his teacher John de Lancie (1921-2002), principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra and its conductor, Eugene Ormandy (1899-1985), gave him the singular honor of playing second oboe while still a student. After graduation in 1969, he spent six years as principal oboe of the St. Louis Symphony. When de Lancie retired from the orchestra in 1977, he became first oboe and in 1985, took over de Lancie’s position of professor of oboe at Curtis. As of 2009, he is only the third oboe instructor in the 85-year history of Curtis. At his level of the music world, only those who can teach.
Music conservatories are where the art music world reproduces itself.
There is a sense of obligation to maintain the standards established over the last 300 years. If there is such a thing as a “Philadelphia sound” for orchestral players, it is characterized by an exceptionally reliable flexibility of tone highly prized (and hired) by music directors. If John de Lancie was Richard’s professional father, Marcel Tabuteau (1887-1966), was his grandfather.
Tabuteau is the giant of Curtis, of American woodwind practice in general, and of the oboe in particular. He wrote that: “Of all the orchestral instruments the oboe is the nearest to the human voice in expressive powers. It has enormous range of emotional suggestion and nuance. It can be witty, melancholy, subtly humorous, appealing, sparkling, all within the space of a few measures of music. A fine oboist can produce as many as 50 different tone colors on a single note.”
When de Lancie died in 2002, Richard wrote that de Lancie had taught him that he could say a lot with a one-note solo. This Sunday’s concert will let his oboe speak to us at much greater length. Go hear it.
David Bentley has lived in Aspen more than 40 years. He has studied music with many students and faculty members of the Music Festival. He has been totally deaf for more than 35 years.
--------------------------
Cheers!
Robert Hubbard
WestwindDoubleReed.com
1-888-579-6020
bob@westwinddoublereed.com
|
|
The Oboe BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
