Marcello Oboe Concerto in C Minor - advice please. One for George perhaps?

Evelyn Rothwell [Lady Barbirolli] was one of the very best of the oboe players and made many recordings of Oboe Concertos, including a lovely reading of the Marcello!

It is out on Dutton Vocalion CD, from a very nice original Pye recording.

Though there may well be more modern recordings, do not write this off for the recording being fifty years old! You may gather that I have yet to find a something better in the line!

Go to

www.duttonvocalion.co.uk

and search under Marcello.

You will find that the recordings which I mention are the third and fourth down, and at a very nice price!



ATB from George

I have a lovely recording of the slow movement played in Bach's transcription to keyboard by Edwin Fischer on the piano. It is one of those really beautiful pieces, everyone should know!!

On Pearl Gemm 9481.

http://www.pavilionrecords.com/

who make wonderful transfers from 78s ...

Unfortunately you need a record shop for this one.

George

For anyone wondering about a most beautiful and all too rarely heard piece, here is a youtube of it, gloriously without picture! Albeit in a transposition in D Minor, which is a valid alternative for the Oboe in the piece.

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

Evelyn Rothwell makes this seem even more of a masterpiece than this rather fine performance, which here melds winds into the normal string orchestra with continuo. She brings a simplicity to it which allows the solo-line, almost without additional graces [embellishments] to sound with achingly sad eloquance. Quite an achievemnent, and not really explainable. You have to know sadness to find what she finds in it.

If anyone wants to find some equally wonderful concertos from Haydn, Albinoni and many more, and even a new one [at the time!] as well as Sir John Barbirolli's take on movements from Pergolesi, arranged as Concerti for his wife to play, then I strongly recomend both the Dutton Discs mentioned above. There is not a duff moment in them.

This great music, and in those recordings sensitively realised, in heart-warming readings.

George

PS: In the early days of the twentieth century this Concerto was often attributed to JS Bach, because he wrote it out for performance, but did not sign it. [And made the keyboard version played by Fischer also mentioned above]. Since then sources nearer Marcello have proved that he was the author.

I have an excellent Naxos CD of this concerto, (oboist Jozsef Kiss, cat. 8.550556) coupled with three CPE Bach oboe works, two concertos and a sonata. The entire Marcello concerto only runs for a tick under 12 minutes.

I assume it's the same work, the liner notes say "once attributed in a lower key to his (Allessandro's) younger brother Benedetto. Published in a collection in 1717 and later transcribed by JS Bach for solo harpsichord", Allessandro being a contemporary of the great man, born a year earlier in 1684, and dying in the same year, 1750.

Nice full sound on this disc, with a good sense of the recorded acoustic.

Though the Concerto is regularly played in a choice of two keys it is the same work.

Lady Barbirolli's Marcello recording times at 10 minutes, 21 seconds. Perhaps surprisingly her approach to the slow second movement is fresher and more forward moving than any other performance I have encountered, and yet carries an un-utterable eloquence. She plays it in C Minor rather than D Minor.

It was a pioneering effort and still posessed of all the freshness that work breaking new ground [in recording terms in modern times] often seems to have.

Naturally the orchestra is not quite such a small or lightweight affair as would be the norm nowadays though the convention of using a correct continuo is beautifully followed, and Sir John fully understood how to get strings to play with exquisite expression within a style that employ the known Baroque conventions, and there is no doubting the musical expression in these works as husband, wife and Halle Orchestra play them, with such utter conviction and poise.

I think it is splendid that even in the twenty-first century we are still considering a rare masterpiece by an eighteenth century Italian, who wrote no more than a handful of works. How time is the true arbiter of greatness in music!

George

A strange upshot of this was that I dug out my old CD of this which contains slightly more than half of what is contained the complete release of Evelyn Rothwell's recordings of Oboe Concertos on Dutton Vocalion, and found that it would no longer play. It had always been one of those CDs which would come off the rails and stop. But it would not play through at all this week.

I managed to persuade Nero to read and rip the contents after two failed attempts. I then burned the resulting RIPs to a new Verbatim CD-R Music, which surprised me by being accepted by Nero [which noprmally only likes data discs], and guess what. It sound much finer than the original NIXA [Pye CDs were issued under the Pye NIXA label before EMI bought the copyright and master tapes, and issued the catalogue under the painfull PheNIXA name!] CD, so I call that a result!

Hence I could give chapter and verse on the timings which normally pass me by!

George

Basically everything Holliger played can be bought on the spot.