Léon Goossens (oboe)
The Boyd Neel Orchestra
(Leader, Maurice Clare )
Conductor, Boyd Neel
Prelude; Forlana; Minuet; Rigaudon Richard Strauss' Oboe Concerto, written in 1945, is one of the works in which, in his old age, he recollected in tranquillity the emotions and ideas of his earlier years. Here is mellow music, graceful and delicate. Leon Goossens was the first to play it in this country, at a Promenade Concert in September 1946.
Ravel himself said of Le Tombeau de
Couperin that it was ' a tribute not so much to Couperin himself as to eighteenth-century French music in general. Completed in 1917, and originally designed for the piano, the Suite consisted of six pieces, each of which was dedicated to the memory of a friend killed in the war. As Roland-Manuel has well said, however, ' their graceful serenity makes them charming rather than melancholy.' Shortly afterwards Ravel orchestrated the Suite, omitting two of the movements; and in this form it was first played at the Concerts Pasdeloup in Paris. Harold Rutland