The oboe d'amore in the spotlight
Katharina Suske and the Freitagsakademie perform Bach concertos for oboe d'amore, violin and flute.
Sometimes, even today, musicians declare peremptorily that Bach sounds good on any instrument he didn't write for. It's music so pure that if you play it on a piano, it's still Bach. These survivors of another era were the first, in the second half of the twentieth century, to condemn the transcriptions of the Swingle Singers or those of Emerson, Lake and Palmer! It's clear, however, that the composer wanted precise sonorities. If, in the second cantata of his Christmas oratorio, Bach writes for two oboes d'amore and two oboes di caccia, these are not timbres chosen at random. It's precisely the oboe d'amore, so highly prized by our composer, that takes pride of place on this recording.
Intonation, so delicate on a Baroque oboe, is never at fault in Katharina Suske's playing, whose mastery of the embouchure delivers a sound of roundness and sensuality that enchants us from the very first phrase. At the head of the Freitagsakademie, the oboist chisels the music of the Leipzig Cantor with precision, offering an organic phrasing of the highest quality.
The recording opens with the sinfonia of one of Bach's two Italian cantatas (although the authorship of "Non sa che sia dolore" is strongly disputed). Jörg Fiedler's flute and Ilia Korol's violin soar over the orchestral basses, making the architecture of the work very clear. This is followed by the magnificent concerto for oboe d'amore in A major. The performers manage, with convincing naturalness, to bring out the liveliness and poetry of this major work in the literature for oboe and orchestra. Karoline Echeverri puts her bow at the service of a magnificent palette of subtle nuances for the violin concerto BWV 1056. Jörg Fiedler's flute, Katharina Suske's oboe d'amore and Karoline Echeverri's violin come together for Walter Hindermann's triple concerto on J.S. Bach cantatas, rounding off a recording of pure joy!
Bach Concertos: Lost and Found. Die Freitagsakademie; Katharina Suske, oboe d'amore & artistic direction. Deutsche harmonia mundi 19658710732
