Oboe Concerto (world premiere, LSO commission)

Program notes

About the Work

This concert gives the world premiere of a brand-new Oboe Concerto by Colin Matthews, written specially for the London Symphony Orchestra’s own Principal Oboe, Olivier Stankiewicz, and commissioned by the orchestra. As a first performance it comes without the cushion of familiarity that surrounds the Bartók and Rachmaninoff on either side of it: there are no famous recordings to recall, no received wisdom about how it ‘should’ sound. That is part of the occasion: an audience hearing a major new work for the first time, brought to life by the very player for whom it was conceived.

Matthews is among the most experienced and respected orchestral composers in Britain, and he knows the LSO intimately; he was its Associate Composer through the 1990s. He also knows the solo concerto as a form, having written concertos and concertante works across his career. The oboe is a particularly characterful solo instrument: penetrating yet plaintive, capable of both pastoral lyricism and quick, agile brilliance, with a singing tone that can cut through a full orchestra or melt into the softest woodwind blend. Writing a concerto for a player of Stankiewicz’s calibre, a prize-winning virtuoso admired for both his beauty of tone and his technical command, gives a composer the freedom to explore the full expressive and athletic range of the instrument.

Because the piece is new, the most honest thing to say about its detail is that the score will speak for itself on the night. What can be said is that Matthews’s orchestral music typically combines clarity and craftsmanship with a strong sense of drama, line and instrumental colour, and that a concerto for principal oboe written for one’s own orchestra is, in effect, a portrait of a player and a partnership. It sits at the heart of the programme as its point of discovery, framed by two twentieth-century masterpieces.

What to Listen For

Approach this one with open, curious ears: you are among the first people ever to hear it. Without recordings to anticipate, simply follow the soloist: listen for how Matthews uses the oboe’s distinctive voice, by turns singing and plangent, nimble and brilliant, and for the conversation between the solo line and the orchestra around it.

Listen for the things a composer can do with a concerto: passages where the oboe sings long, expressive melodies above the orchestra; quicker, more virtuosic writing that shows off the soloist’s agility; moments where the solo instrument is set against, echoed by or absorbed into the orchestral woodwind; and the overall shape of the piece: how it builds, contrasts and resolves across its span of around twenty minutes. Above all, listen to Olivier Stankiewicz, the player for whom every note was written, and to the sense of occasion in hearing a new work step into the world for the first time.