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Re: Best living oboists?

Author: Bobo
Date: 2010-12-11 17:47

I love the baroque oboe works as well. However, that music was composed for a different instrument than the one we play today. Not that some of our best oboists can't do the music justice...Holliger, Klein, Leleux just to take a few non-exclusive examples are so great that you don't care that they're playing baroque music on modern instruments, they even play to the modern instrument's strengths to do new things musically.

But in general I much prefer hearing the old repertoire on period instruments. For example, listen to Schneeman on this YouTube clip and tell me you could get anywhere near the effect on a modern oboe. Baroque music simply makes more sense to me in terms of mapping the music onto the instrument when I hear it played on period oboes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W37IDjpwPg&NR=1

Or Alfredo Bernardini on the same piece:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwIedzuhYOI&feature=related

Marcel Ponseele is another great great player. I love this Vivaldi in particular (when I go back to my favorite recordings of it on modern oboe, it just isn't the same for me):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRd8EuJATzg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgQz899oW_8

Or America's greatest baroque player:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HBIw8-eXds&feature=fvsr

On the other hand, the more modern concertos sound like they belong on the modern oboes for which they were written. Btw, I wholeheartedly agree that oboe repertoire pretty much pales when held up to the violin concerto repertoire. I hate to say it, but the violin is a more virtuosic instrument with a much greater range of expressive possibilities (not to mention a much greater range scale-wise); the top 10 or so violin concertos are in a different league altogether (baroque too: just compare Alex Klein's impressive versions of the Bach Violin Partitas using an oboe that goes down to low A with what a great violinist is doing in the Chaconne from the same suite.)

Having said that, I think the Strauss is one of the few (if not the only?) oboe concertos that sets its sights high enough from the standpoint of musical scope and technical ambition to make it into the same orbit as the top violin concertos. I suppose that sentence could get me lynched at an IDRS convention!

Post Edited (2010-12-11 19:09)

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OboeMother

2010-12-10 02:07