Concerto on themes from the opera La Favorita by Donizetti (c 1870?)

Known in his day “the Paganini of the oboe” and described by no less an authority than New Grove as “perhaps the greatest oboist of all times” Antonio Pasculli was certainly a very remarkable instrumentalist. He might not have invented circular breathing, as is sometimes claimed, but, if he didn’t, his breath control in playing the virtuoso pieces he wrote for himself must have been prodigious. His “concerto” on La Favorita, one of his many fantasias on popular operas of the day, works by Donizetti and Verdi being among his favourites, is a characteristically extravagant example.

Pasculli selected two themes from La Favorita, the tenor aria Spirto gentil from the fourth act and the chorus Dolce zeffiro from the first, both of which are anticipated before Spirto gentil is definitively introduced in a C major Adagio by the piano. After an oboe cadenza, a pause, and a change of tempo to Allegretto, the piano changes the subject to Dolce zeffiro in F major. The rest of the work, apart from the expressive intervention of a Molto largo in F minor, is a series of ever quicker, ever more astonishing variations with an Allegro velocissimo coda.