Concerto for oboe and small orchestra

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Concerto for oboe and small orchestra

Allegro moderato -

Andante -

Vivace

Perhaps the greatest quality of Strauss’s later works, like the Oboe Concerto and the Four Last Songs, is their wonderfully easy mastery, their fertile inspiration and effortless technique. Richard Strauss in his eighties didn’t have to go out of his way to prove anything - unless it was his ability to work undisturbed in post-war exile in Switzerland, where his wife complained how boring life was and he quietly got on with completing the Oboe Concerto he had started at home in Garmisch. The work had been commissioned by an American soldier, John de Lancy, in civilian life principal oboe of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, who had taken the opportunity to call on the composer when stationed nearby. It was completed at the end of October 1945 and first performed in Zurich four months later - not by de Lancy, who had the American rights on it, but by the Swiss oboist Marcel Saillet.

There are no heroics in the Oboe Concerto. It begins on the cellos with the merest wriggle of a theme in D major, just two notes repeated, and from those notes the whole of the opening paragraph is developed - in a long liquid line on the solo oboe, discreetly counterpointed at first by a viola and then less discreetly by a clarinet. The wriggle is scarcely ever absent from one part of the texture or another and, after playing a prominent part in the first orchestral episode, it is incorporated in the second subject when the oboe makes its quiet re-entry with the new theme. There are two more second-subject themes - a broader one on violins and woodwind and a playful one which the soloist introduces and likes so much that it occupies far more than its fair share of the development. The other themes make up for it in the recapitulation, however, and it is on the repeated notes of the broader second-subject melody (and the wriggle on the cellos of course) that Strauss makes his transition to the Andante.

The B flat major slow movement is in ternary form with a somewhat quicker middle section where the orchestra quite plainly recalls those elements of the first movement which had been more subtly incorporated in the shapely solo line of the opening section. To make the relationships absolutely clear, the soloist goes over them again in a cadenza and, moreover, anticipates the main theme of the last movement before skipping brightly into the new Vivace tempo and the tonic key of D major.

As it proceeds, however, it seems that this closing rondo movement has a life of its own. Neither the rondo theme itself nor the first episode, which is based on an expressive syncopated melody, has anything in common with earlier material. It is only in the second episode, where the oboe and clarinet reintroduce the broad melody with the repeated notes, that Strauss begins to form direct links with the first movement. After a short cadenza, the metre changes from 2/4 to 6/8 and here, at last, under a new version of a rondo theme on the oboe, the strings begin to wriggle again. Variant of that basic motif (mainly on violins and violas) persist alongside all kinds of thematic reminiscences before it appears upside -down in the soloist’s emphatic last words.