Maria Sournatcheva - Russian Oboe Concertos (2016)

Elements of folkloric characters pervade this enchanting program bringing together works by Moscow composers from three generations. The Göttingen Symphony Orchestra with

the conductor Christoph-Mathias Mueller offers the young ARD Competition prizewinner Sournatcheva an accomplished ensemble’s support system. The same orchestra’s devotion to Slavic music recently earned it an ECHO Klassik prize.

The oboe must have appealed to Valery Kikta as a solo instrument, given that he composed four concertos for it. The Ukrainian composer had originally written the one-movement “Belgorod Concerto” for an orchestra enjoying great popularity in Russia and the Soviet Union and featuring folk instruments.

Kikta’s third concerto with an accompaniment limited to a string orchestra tends more toward chamber music, and the same may be said of the piece by Andrey Rubtsov, an internationally sought-after oboist born in 1982 who expertly employs the virtuosic resources of his instrument.

Andrey Eshpai’s highly ambitious concerto forms the crowning conclusion of this SACD. The old master of the postwar avantgarde died at the age of ninety in 2015.

In his oboe concerto too Eshpai refers to his ethnic roots in the Finno-Ugric people of the Mari; his father before him had collected Mari melodies and committed them to paper. In a compositional style in keeping with modern times, Eshpai conjures up a tonal idiom all of his own lending fascinating new expression to the power of folk art in the multiethnic Russian realm.