A few notes on today’s program with the PostClassical Ensemble and Angel Gil-Ordoñez at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC

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There it was, a plastic band model lying forlorn on the fold-out table, waiting for a departing fourth grader to choose it amongst the picked-over band instruments. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to play the oboe, per se, but rather that I was aware of all of the instruments I did not want to play. Flute? Clarinet? Saxophone? Trumpet? Percussion? By no means. Did I know the oboe was itself unusual? Beyond the fact that it had not yet been chosen by any one else, probably not. Did I realize the lifetime of toil crafting its mouthpieces from dried cane would entail? Certainly not. Whatever the reason, I carried it home that day, and somehow, it stuck.

The oboe’s reedy tone is a thing of antiquity. A pair of thinly-scraped pieces of cane, vibrating against each other, set upon a resonating tube, creates instruments that exist across global cultures. Whether an Armenian duduk, a Korean piri or a Chinese suona, there is a fundamental quality to the sound that explains its ability to stir emotion and, as proven in Hollywood film scores, tug on our heartstrings. But the oboe is so much more than a plangent cantilena! This afternoon’s program explores its panoply of colors, from its warmth as a (mostly) keyless baroque-era instrument to the incisive diversity of sound conjured by 20th and 21st Century composers.

Venetian composer Tomaso Albinoni penned over a dozen concerti for oboe and, even better, two oboes. Albinoni is thought to have been the first Italian composer to use the oboe as a solo instrument, publishing his first set of oboe concerti (Opus 7) in 1715. His second set, Opus 9, from which this afternoon’s D minor Concerto stems, was likely written in 1722. The D minor Concerto, No. 2, is a particular gem. Its opening movement is stately, gallant, even, offering amiable dialogue between the soloist and the strings. The opening arpeggiated chords of the slow movement, the heavenly, lingering opening tone of the oboe and the seemingly endless spin of the slow-moving melody make for one of the more beautiful movements of the hundreds of oboe concerti provided to us by baroque-era composers. The work’s final movement bustles in 6/8 time, maintaining rounded edges and refined turns of phrase.

The same could not be said for Krzysztof Penderecki’s Capriccio for Oboe and 11 Strings. As an instrument the oboe developed considerably between 1722 and 1964. What in the baroque era was a generally mellow, sweet, if at times uneven sound had, by the early 20th Century, been “refined” into something far more direct, exact and powerful. An intricate keywork solved tuning and sound variations, and the use of harder, more dense woods created a more focused tone. Penderecki and Luciano Berio, whose music is heard later in the program, were both inspired and guided by the great Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger. In the 60s Holliger enumerated a series of playing techniques that explore sound beyond the traditional methods of playing the instrument. These so-called “extended techniques” fueled a modernist Golden Age of oboe composition over the second half of the 20th Century. 

Capriccio is a relentless, chimeric work that pairs dramatic interaction between the soloist and the strings with quicksilver changes in character. Penderecki uses a menu of sound options, from double trills to glissandi, flutter tongue to extreme registers to create an electrifying work that is rarely played and rarely heard. Capriccio was written in 1964 while Penderecki was living in Krakow, three years after the composition of his renowned Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. There is no shortage of political engagement in Penderecki’s output, and while one should be wary of assigning extra-musical meaning to any piece of music, it is hard to be a human in early 2025 and not sense a connection between the capriciousness of our political present and that of Penderecki’s. If anything, the context provides grim inspiration to the performer as to how to execute the work’s seemingly incongruous, at times ill-advised and perhaps even laughable assertions.

George Walker’s Lyric for Strings, originally entitled Lament, offers significant contrast to Penderecki’s modernism. Written in 1946 as the slow movement of his first string quartet, Walker later expanded the material to be a stand-alone work for string orchestra. Its amber harmonies and stirring, chorale-like writing speak to an adroit compositional voice and conjure a deeply poignant mid-Century Americana.

In 2016 I had the privilege of being a part of the creation of Dolce la morte, a chamber opera by American composer Suzanne Farrin. The composer selected a series of Michelangelo’s sonnets inspired by the artist’s muse Tommaso de’ Cavalieri. Little is known of the true nature of their relationship, but Michelangelo’s intense emotions surrounding the young Roman nobleman pour off the page; his words inspired a musical language cut through with searching - yearning - in Farrin’s work. The penultimate scene of the opera is an oboe solo, l’onde (della non vostra) (the waves that are not yours), in which the composer translates that yearning into sound, employing alien wisps of tone and dramatic directionality to convey a sense of unattainability, indeed of loss.

Born in Little Rock, Arkansas and educated at Boston’s New England Conservatory, Florence Price was a trailblazer. Price composed over 300 works and was the first African-American woman to have a piece performed by a major American orchestra, all in the face of headwinds unknown to most other American composers of the era. Her Adoration began its life as a work for organ; the composer subsequently adapted it for a number of different instrumentations. This afternoon’s version of Adoration is borrowed from violinists, and may just sound even more beautiful on the oboe.

Luciano Berio’s Chemins IV owes its creation to another, earlier work: his Sequenza VII. The Sequenza is a work for solo oboe with a drone pitched at the tone B-natural in which the oboist is required to find six different ways, different colors, of playing that same tone. From there the range expands and contracts around the drone, not simply to other pitches, but to a palette of sounds so colorful and creative that they have formed the basis of contemporary oboe music ever since. The Sequenza, however, is no mere collection of curious sounds - it is a deeply musical, expertly paced work, one with a keen sense of tension and release, of movement and of stasis, of lyricism and of virtuosity, of harsh edges and soft delicate textures. Chemins IV takes the exact musical material of the Sequenza and places it in the context of a string orchestra playing entirely new material. Berio himself describes the work as “...an analysis, a commentary and an extension of the original…a tribute to the belief that a thing done is never finished… Like a reverberating chamber, the development of Chemins IV mirrors and shatters the elements of Sequenza VII, sometimes receiving their anticipated echo in such a way that for the listener the oboe part seems generated by the eleven strings.” 

The American thread of this program, from George Walker to Florence Price to Kevin Puts, finds us at the latter’s Oboe Concerto No. 1. The work was premiered at the Kennedy Center in 1997 and offers a rare post-minimalist contribution to the oboe repertoire. Its opening is marked “Vigorous” and is almost angular in its execution, a kind of severity from the strings that the oboe player moves towards playfulness, and eventually transforms into a kind of calmness, even if the final phrases leave open an unanswered question. The second movement is a glorious example of the oboe’s unique lyrical sensibility set atop a bed of strings - the music sings, and, not unlike in Albinoni’s D minor Concerto, may just be the core of the work. The third movement is a kind of moto perpetuo, at times driving, at other times lilting, eventually leading us to an irresistible finale.

I hope you will find variety and breadth amongst the works on this afternoon’s program - and hopefully, of course, a greater sense of the versatility and depth of the instrument. It is a rare privilege to be offered carte blanche on a musical program; I am immensely grateful to Angel Gil-Ordoñez and the PostClassical Ensemble for the opportunity to make the case for my instrument and its repertoire. I often wonder whether I made the right decision on that fateful day in elementary school, to pick up the “ill wind that no one blows good”. Afternoons like these give me some sense that what I knew I didn’t want led me to something overlooked - something unusual - something rather marvelous.