Oboe Sonata (1947)

Final: Assez allant

Dutilleux’s three scores for a solo woodwind instrument and piano were written, like much French wind music, as competition pieces for the Paris Conservatoire. Of these, however, only the Oboe Sonata makes it into the accepted canon, and only just at that. The earliest work the coomposer now recognises is the monumental Piano Sonata of 1946. Anything before that, including the very successful Flute Sonatina, he has disowned. Even the Oboe Sonata, he says, in reaction against the still surviving aesthetic of the Groupe des Six, ‘belongs to a period when my music was too close to the spirit of the “divertissement” –    particularly in this case at the beginning and the end of the Finale.’

But, surely, Dutilleux was being too hard on his Oboe Sonata. The opening of the first movement, low in the pianist’s left hand, is as far from the “divertissement” as any passacaglia and, although that form doesn’t actually materialise, the contrapuntal relationship between the two instruments continues until a crescendo drives the oboe up to a long-held high F – from which it descends by way of a cadenza in the closing bars. Although the second movement is described as a scherzo, the drily articulated rhythms in the piano part are too aggressive for a “divertissment.” While it is true that the main theme of the finale has a certain Poulenc-like charm, much of the movement is concerned with the sustained and sometimes faintly exotic melodic line that emerges on the oboe in the middle