Oboe concertos vol.2

It's already been about four years since the Radio Chamber Orchestra, Jan Willem de Vriend and I recorded three of the six of Lebrun's last series of oboe concerti. Of course it was inevitable: now we've completed the series. At the time, I tried to explain in my 'motivation statement' that life is no sinecure for anyone with pretensions to being a real oboist. You can guess already: nothing has changed since I wrote that. The greatest composers, after the baroque period didn't write any solo literature for the oboe, neither Schubert, nor Brahms, a bit of Schumann, nor Mendelssohn, nor Shostakovich, nor Stravinsky, a bit of Strauss. Well, yes, we do have Mozart: an oboe quartet and oboe concerto! Beautiful music indeed. And then, of course, our grand obsession: Beethoven! We know for certain that the young Beethoven wrote an oboe concerto, but where is it? Is it somewhere in someone's attic in a big box? Stuck behind the wallpaper? Was it burnt? Was it ruined by a flood? Or is the handwriting unrecognizable? In short, the trials and tribulations (for the oboist, of course). But there's a silver lining to every cloud: any real oboist is obliged to go out and search for repertoire by unknown geniuses! And after all, that's not such a bad thing, because sometimes those very same composers bring forth the most innovations and striking ideas. They may not be not of the very first rank, seen in the hard light of posterity, but because of that very lack of pretense, they are free to experiment.
(Bart Schneemann)