Skip to main content

Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra

I went through a phase, about eight years ago, when I downloaded (via less than fully legal means) a great quantity of classical music: so much of it, that I spent a full year just listening to it all, at the rate of an hour or two a day. One of the composers whose work caught my ear during that time was Bohislav Martinů, with pieces like his Nonets and the wonderful 'Fantasia for Theremin, Oboe, String Quartet and Piano' standing out in particular.

Afterwards, trying to do the right thing, I began buying some of his music on CD, and, on a few occasions, was lucky enough to turn up an old LP of his work at a charity shop. The present disc, combining Martinů's 'Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra' with Richard Strauss's Oboe Concerto, I found at the Oxfam Books & Music shop in Cardiff. In Discogs I have my copy listed  as from the original 1963 pressing, but it could well be a later re-issue. The soloist is František Hanták, accompanied by the Brno State Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Martin Turnovský (for the Martinů) and Jaroslav Vogel (for the Strauss).

I seldom play the Strauss piece, but much enjoy Martinů's, which is bright, breezy & agreeably concise, running to about sixteen minutes. "The score reveals the influence of Igor Stravinsky, including a quotation of a motif from Petrushka in the second movement" says Wikipedia. Unusually, the orchestral line-up for the Concerto includes a piano - it seems that most of my favourite Martinů pieces feature piano: the Violin Sonata No. 3; the Piano Trios; the Piano Quartet & Quintets; Les Rondes; the abovementioned Fantasia and the Nonet No. 1, etc.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...