Elaine Douvas, Christopher Gaudi & Marc Shapiro
On one of our bookshelves at home is a very fat book called “A Guide to the Pianist’s Literature.” Its 860 pages contain brief descriptions of virtually every solo work ever written for the piano. Right next to this book is a tiny, half-inch thick book entitled, “The Solo Repertoire for the Violin, Viola and Cello.” However, we don’t have such a guide to the solo repertoire of wind and brass instruments, for the simple reason that this repertoire is very small and relies heavily on transcriptions.
However, every once in a while we have the pleasure of hearing a master of one of the woodwind or brass instruments take a time out from orchestras and ensembles, their usual milieu, and share with us little known solo treasures they live with on a daily basis. Hidden Valley Music Seminars (HVMS) has been helping this to happen for a number of years as it regularly invites distinguished soloists to spend a week at Hidden Valley giving private lessons and master classes, plus solo and ensemble concerts.
This week HVMS is playing host to two distinguished oboists, Elaine Douvas and Christopher Gaudi plus the fine pianist, Marc Shapiro. It was our pleasure last night to hear these three musicians tote out for us some unfamiliar music.
Surprisingly, three out of the six works were heard were not transcriptions, but works originally written for Oboe. The first of these, the Sonata for Oboe & Piano by Camille Saint-Saëns, performed by Ms Douvas, took a backward look in its first movement to an older antique style, rather than the more Romantic style we associate with Saint-Saëns. After a lovely recitative in the slow movement, the final Molto Allegro gave Douvas an opportunity to display dazzling virtuosity and some powerful emotional moments.
The second original work was the Vivaldi Concerto in D Minor, RV 454, which Mr. Gaudi tossed off with ease while displaying a confident mastery. As we would expect from Vivaldi this work is loaded with alternations of tonic and dominant in delightful sequences, but also with some nice surprises here and there with deceptive cadences and an occasional Neapolitan sixth. After the Largo, where Gaudi proved to be a master of tasteful ornamentation and embellishment, he tossed of the final Allegro and made some difficult passages look very easy.
Perhaps the most astonishing work on the program was the Sonata in C Major, K. 14, by Mozart, which was performed by Gaudi and Shapiro. This is such an early work I was expecting a minor piece of juvenilia. Well, it was anything but. An unexpected cadential flourish for solo oboe begins this work, and its surprises kept on coming. Pleasant Gallant flourishes alternated with unexpected excursions into minor keys to give us moments of Sturm und Drang. The second movement featured some charming repartee between oboe and keyboard, and the spritely minuets closed the work with more substantial moments of charm.
The concert began with the Duo on Themes from Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” in a paraphrase by Hyacinthe Klosé (now there’s a composer most of us have never heard of), and this was kind of a double transcription, since it was originally for clarinet & oboe, and in this instance Gaudi was playing the clarinet part on the oboe. Douvas informed the audience that this transposition from clarinet to oboe is more difficult than you might imagine, although we were not to know this from Gaudi’s smooth and masterful performance. This charming duet featured lots of razzle dazzle virtuoso display, but also with much genuine charm. It wasn’t only the two oboes sharing the razzle dazzle, for pianist Shapiro played up a storm throughout.
An amazing work of transcription was yet to be heard, and that was Ravel’s Alborada del Gracioso, a solo piano piece transcribed by Douvas for Oboe & Piano. This was a brilliant transcription and it received a brilliantly satisfying performance by Douvas and Shapiro (his part is just as difficult as hers). I believe Douvas added in a flourish of her own, a clever chromatically descending cadenza near the end and it was delightful.
The concert finished off with Romance de Galatée by Fernando Fortunati, which is from a set of six works for oboe & piano. This was so charming I wished they had played some others from the same set.
There was no encore, and I was disappointed, for I had been hoping to hear the Adagio from the Marcello Oboe Concerto, but, alas, it was not to be. It may be that oboists play this work so often that it has perhaps lost its charm for them. Well, that is our loss.
As always Peter Meckel provides a very nice reception following the concert where the large audience had an opportunity to mingle with the artists.
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