00:00 - I. Allegro moderato: Très modéré mais sans lenteur
07:17 - II. Scherzo: Allegro vivo
13:47 - III. Andante: Très calme, presque adagio
18:26 - VI. Final: Allegro moderato, sans traîner
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Oboe: Stefan Schilli
Piano: Oliver Triendl
Year of Recording: 2015
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"Koechlin was already accomplished on the hunting horn when he bought an oboe in March 1893 -- he was 15 -- and began to take lessons. He also played a saxhorn (included by Berlioz in Les Troyens) and horn, and, of course, the piano, at which he was sufficiently adept to accompany his symphonically conceived songs and to take the piano part in his less-demanding sonatas. Shattery recordings from 1947 remain of Koechlin playing two pieces from his cycle L'Ancienne maison de campagne -- not difficult but imbued with poetry. The point to notice is his proclivity for melody instruments early on. The piano is the instrument of harmony, par excellence, and, following Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde awash in the "sea of harmony," much Romantic music is harmonically conceived. While Koechlin's polytonal harmony and writing in open intervals of a fifth or fourth are some of the most original features of his mature manner, his works are linear in conception -- often, composition meant writing the melodic line for an entire composition first and independently working out harmonic, modulatory, and contrapuntal elaborations. The upshot is a fluent polyphony, which, while seldom abandoning tonality, seems to shift in and out of harmonic focus. Nor are Koechlin's pieces formless -- form is dictated by his material -- but taken with his utter lack of interest in sonata form, the "tout ensemble of the whole" is uniquely disconcerting. Add to these failures to meet ordinary expectations Koechlin's predilection for a vein of Romanticism closer to fairytale than to the lurid tropes of eroticism, the "Romantic agony" of such things as Strauss' Salome or Schreker's Die Gezeichneten, and Koechlin's music becomes a special taste -- though one well worth acquiring. The Oboe Sonata, for instance, harks back to the vision of Virgilian pastoral informing many of Koechlin's compositions -- especially those for oboe, oboe d'amore, and cor anglais. Though not essential to one's enjoyment, the program suggested by the movement titles lends a meaningful overlay to listening -- the opening Allegro moderato is subtitled "The earth, work in the fields"; the bitonally hallucinatory Scherzo, "a dance of fauns in the forest"; the elegiac Andante, "evening in the country"; the final Allegro moderato, "the country house," a rippling evocation of childhood frolics searchingly recalled in L'Ancienne maison de campagne. Composed between 1911 and 1916, the Oboe Sonata received its premiere by Koechlin's erstwhile oboe instructor, M.L. Bleuzet, and his wife on March 18, 1922, at Paris' Salle Érard." (Adrian Corleonis)
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