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hcmf// 2014 kicked off with a typically tough and knotty concert from Petr Kotik's chamber orchestra Ostravská banda, who performed a collection of UK premieres for small ensemble by Christian Wolff, three Czech composers and another American. The concert was billed as a tribute to Wolff, who was in attendance and who celebrates his eightieth birthday this year, and this acknowledgement of his status as one of the few remaining high modernists allowed the festival to begin with a celebration of the music with which it has been most closely associated. First up was Wolff's 37 Haiku, a setting of a poem (or 37 poems) by John Ashbery, sung by Thomas Buckner with an accompanying ensemble of oboe, horn, viola and cello. Like the poems, Wolff's settings are self-contained but accumulative, and, as the composer says in the programme notes, the ‘may form’ a whole. Variety is achieved through shifts within the accompanying instrumentation (some settings having none), line and fragmentation, instrumental technique, suggestions of common-practice harmony, flashes of word painting and spoken accompaniment from the instrumentalists (one haiku is spoken by the violinist, another is spoken in fragments across the ensemble). Coherence across these fragments is created simply through the presence of Wolff's mature and distinctive post-Webern sound world.

This article presents a view of the first meetings between the oboe virtuoso Christopher Redgate and the composers Dorothy Ker and Fabrice Fitch. The article details some aspects of these meetings to highlight the processes that are at play in the earliest stages of collaboration. These processes are both practical (in which information about how the oboe works is uncovered and shared) and philosophical (in which the oboe itself becomes a significant source of new possibilities). The article traces a period during which Redgate was developing a new oboe, working with composers to create new repertoire for the new instrument. Arguing for closer attention to the ‘everyday’ aspects of composers and performers working together, the article explores some of the ways in which Redgate pulls apart his experience of performing to develop new technique and to opening up new possibilities for future composition. I also argue that the oboe, as much as the composer and performer, plays a part in shaping musical outcomes.

IT IS ALWAYS FRUSTRATING, in these days of necessarily limited rehearsals, when the all-too-short time that one has allocated to a piece becomes beset by boring textual problems. Valuable minutes can slip away, while the point under discussion may make no appreciable difference whatever to the actual performance; and it is all the more galling when (as often in the present work) dissection eventually reveals the score to be more likely at fault, the parts probably correct, and therefore the dissection itself to have been an entire red herring. But I have long suspected there to be a considerable iceberg of misprints of all sorts in the Strauss Oboe Concerto, such are the problems that one always encounters in rehearsing it. And was consequently delighted to discover recently how much valuable source material awaited the enquiring eye no further from home than the Archive Department of Boosey and Hawkes. I am indebted to Mr Robert Cowan both for unearthing the earlier sources and for his patience in assisting me to consult them on many occasions; and I have set out below the errors and misreadings-many of them very significant-that have been discovered. It must be added that this cannot claim to be complete since not every single note of the autograph has been checked; but there is so much here that needs to be known that I present it as it is, and would only plead that if other conductors or players know of any other problems, I would love to add them to the collection.

THAT BENJAMIN BRITTEN already possessed in his early twenties a most astonishing technical assurance has never been in doubt; nor that he commanded a range of feeling and a stylistic integrity which proclaimed a uniquely precocious maturity. So much was evident from early published scores like the Sinfonietta, Phantasy for oboe quartet, Variations on a theme of Frank Bridge, and Our Hunting Fathers. The route by which he had reached this early maturity, however, was not generally known until comparatively recently, and the book which was for decades to remain the most reliable and perceptive guide to his music—the symposium of 1952 edited by Donald Mitchell and Hans Keller—said little about the pre-opus 1 works, or about influences.

In about 1920 I found in the archives of the Mozarteum at Salzburg a bundle of papers most probably belonging to the so-called “Mozart Legacy” (i.e., a legacy of Mozart's son, including many pieces of the property of the master himself.) This contained manuscript parts of Viennese origin produced already in the 18th century, perhaps in the Offizin Lausch. The title of the envelope of the Bass part reads: “Concerto in C: oboe principale 2 violini 2 oboi 2 corni viola e basso Del Sigre W. A. Mozart.” It was immediately clear that these parts corresponded with the famous Flute Concerto in D Major. When, later on, I reconstructed the score from them, I noticed a number of apparently unimportant deviations from the flute version which, however, turned out to be most significant, as they convinced me that I had come across the original version of this Concerto.

clusion of tuba and double bassoon makes possible, together with the string basses, some range of positive colours at a very low pitch, so that the cello can be accommodated in its lowest register without having of necessity to be the functional bass too. The upper woodwind tend to be used as a composite group in a fairly high register, so that their tubby middle harmony shall not blanket the soloist. To point to all the felicities of orchestral lay-out in this score would require another article. Some of these can be glimpsed from the examples quoted, and I must restrict myself to a few of those which, in this as yet unheard work, most keenly stimulate the aural imagination. The development of the first movement includes a dialogue between double bassoon and high clarinet (later oboe) supported only by the soloist's oscillating thirds. At one point the scherzo surrounds a loud, nagging cello figuration with a high oboe octave pp and a Stygian chord (modelled on Ex.5, bar3) on horn pedal, tuba and double bassoon ppp; and the tenuity of texture that typifies this movement is often produced by no more than two widely separated instruments. The finale's rhapsodic fifth variation has a background shimmer of empty fourths on vibraphone and flutes, later translated to much lower register by horns and tam-tam. But aural titillation, if less surely calculated than this, is not the least common attraction of much of the music written today. I do not doubt that, when this symphony reaches performance, we shall recognize in the nobility and economy of its ideas, and in the masterly structures in which their potentialities are realized, Britten's most considerable achievement in the field of purely instrumental music. Once again, Rostropovich may take pride in a tribute that far surpasses a mere salutation of virtuosity.

In many ways Edinburgh is the most substantial, the most luxurious, the most opulent of British Festivals, yet not necessarily the most interesting or even the most significant. It is as well to remind ourselves that British Festivals did not begin with, and certainly do not end at Edinburgh. They have been characters on our musical stage for many years, although all too often they have disguised themselves with distressing reticence in the drabbest robes and made use of a property-box that has not caught up with the times. The Messiah might give way to a younger work now and again, if the suggestion were not considered revolutionary. A change round of the cast, a draft of new blood, is always refreshing, and indeed essential, if a festival is not to become a funeral. Charles Stuart, writing in TEMPO in the autumn of 1947, bemoaned the complacency of the Leeds Festival of that year and gave a list of the “Festival battle-horses”—Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Berlioz' Te Deum, Verdi's Requiem—which drew the cortège to its final resting place. The Leeds authorities seem to have realized the importance of a blood transfusion, and Mr. Stuart could not complain of the 1950 programme, which shows this Victorian infant (born in 1858) to be still of lusty and adventurous age and embarking on the second public performance in England of Britten's Spring Symphony, besides Honegger's rarely-heard King David, Rubbra's Morning Watch Motet, Strauss's Oboe Concerto and Vaughan Williams' Sixth Symphony.

Although Benjamin Britten is incontestably the best known English composer of his generation he is young enough for a few lines of biographical introduction to be not yet superfluous. He was born at Lowestoft, November 22nd, 1913. He began composing at an early age, and has rescued some of the material of these youthful efforts in a “Simple Symphony” for strings. While attending Gresham's School at Holt, Norfolk, he had lessons at holiday time from Frank Bridge for composition and Harold Samuel for the piano. From 1930 to 1933 he studied at the Royal College of Music, where his teachers were John Ireland for composition and Arthur Benjamin for the piano. The first of his works to attract general attention were the choral variations, A Boy was Born (1932), and a Phantasy Quartet for oboe and strings which was performed at the Florence (1934) Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music.