Vivaldi: Oboe Concertos (CD review)

Alex Klein, oboe; Anthony Newman, New Brandenburg Collegium. Cedille FOUNDation CDR 7003.

As you know, Cedille is a small, Chicago-based record company that specializes in using local talent to produce audiophile-quality discs. However, they also sometimes distribute material they didn't record themselves, issuing it on their mid-priced Cedille FOUNDation label, such as this album of Vivaldi oboe concertos originally released by the Musical Heritage Society in 1995.

Italian priest, violinist, and composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) produced a ton of scores, composed largely while he was a music teacher at the Ospedale dlla Pieta, a home for poor, orphaned, or abandoned girls. His compositions include not only the familiar Four Seasons but over forty-five operas, ninety sonatas, multitudinous choral pieces, and some five-hundred concertos. If many of us tend to think of his work as sounding pretty much alike, especially the concertos, I'd say we have every reason for thinking so. For instance, I had no idea the man wrote as many oboe concertos as he did, over twenty of them, several in dispute. This disc contains eight concertos for oboe and strings, the program totaling about seventy-five minutes.

The soloist here is Alex Klein, a multiple award winner and former principal oboist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, probably the connection to Cedille. He and the New Brandenburg Collegium, a group with which I am unfamiliar, provide lively, entertaining interpretations of the music, Klein's playing wonderfully versatile and virtuosic. He and the ensemble perform these works with great spontaneity and verve. Indeed, I have no idea when the man stops to take a breath, but his style is beautifully fluid, extended, and endlessly dazzling.

Klein's booklet notes comment on these concertos in all likelihood being too difficult for oboists of Vivaldi's day to play, and one listen to the musical gymnastics Klein performs on his oboe confirms the opinion. The music requires the utmost expertise, which Klein just happens to possess.

As for the concertos themselves, well, even though I've heard them a number of times over the years, I admit I could never tell them apart, then or now. If it's of any interest, of the concertos on this disc I prefer the one in C Major, F. VII, No. 6, best of all for its delightful yet mature spirit.

Recorded in September, 1993, at the Performing Arts Center of the State University of New York, the sound is fairly close but with a warm, smooth response. There's a wide stereo spread, with a good dynamic thrust and a reasonably clear midrange. While the high and low ends might have shown greater range and the stage depth could have been more pronounced, these concerns are almost inconsequential when listening to such sparkling performances. The playing and the music make you forget almost everything else.

JJP