Proof that the oboe needn’t sound sad

LONGING FOR PARADISE

Albrecht Mayer (piano); Jakub Hrůša (cond) DG

Some instruments one can listen to all evening, because they have so many different facets. Take the violin; it can be sentimental, ardent, folky, brilliantly virtuoso. Others have such a sharply defined personality that one can only take them in small doses. The oboe is a good example. It seems to be permanently fixed in a posture of pastoral melancholy, and it’s certainly not very good at virtuoso fireworks.

This new album from the gifted German player Albrecht Mayer shrewdly plays up to the conventional image of the oboe, but also pushes against it. The title Longing for Paradise points to the unspoken theme linking the four pieces, all of which seem to be touched by the shadow of war. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (cleverly arranged here for oboe and orchestra by Joachim Schmeisser) was composed in memory of four friends who were killed in the First World War, while Richard Strauss’s delightful Oboe Concerto feels like a deliberate attempt to recover the rococo elegance of his beloved Dresden, destroyed by Allied bombing in the Second World War.

The most intriguing piece is Eugene Goossens’s Oboe Concerto of 1927, which mingles neoclassical nostalgia and a strange, vaguely film-noir menace. It’s no lost masterpiece, but is certainly well worth hearing. Most poignantly regretful of all is the tiny Soliloquy by Edward Elgar, which is all the composer managed to complete of a projected suite for oboe and orchestra begun in 1930, just four years before he died.

Mayer is co-principal oboist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and one of a tiny handful of globe-trotting oboe stars. He makes a fabulous sound, sometimes rich as cream, sometimes pure and focused. More importantly, he’s an intelligent musician who brings out these pieces’ variety, as well as their affinities. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Jakub Hrůša are ideal accompanists, discreet when they need to be, and full of personality when they don’t. It’s a delightful album, with more range of tone and feeling than you might expect.