A wag once remarked that the oboe is ‘an ill wind that nobody blows good.’ Whilst it is true that the oboe is one of the more difficult of instruments to master, in the hands of a good player it may be the loveliest wind of all. It is certainly capable of a very wide range of expression—no instrument can be more lyrically plaintive than an oboe, or more spikily amusing—and over the centuries composers have taken advantage of the instrument’s many qualities to write some very fine concertos for it. Here are our favourites.
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The most intensely lyrical of all woodwind instruments, the oboe has a long and distinguished history. Undisputed king of the woodwind during the baroque era, the instrument features heavily throughout Bach’s works as well as appearing in myriad sonatas and concertos by other composers of the period. The arrival of the clarinet in the late eighteenth century rather nudged the instrument out of the limelight. Mozart turned to the clarinet for his last and greatest wind pieces, rather setting the tone for subsequent composers (Brahms, for example, who wrote some of his finest chamber music for clarinet but nothing whatsoever for oboe), although the 20th-century saw many notable additions to the repertoire, including concertos by Richard Strauss and Vaughan Williams, along with Poulenc’s melancholy late sonata. Continue reading...
