Albrecht Mayer - Voices of Bach (2011)

Jumping from Mozart on Deutsche Grammophon to Bach on Decca, oboist Albrecht Mayer continues to explore transcriptions as well as works originally for his instrument on Voices of Bach. This is a good and necessary thing since neither Mozart nor Bach wrote a sufficient number of works for the oboe to fill out a single disc. In the case of Bach, Mayer has hit on the ingenious solution of including not just Bach's canonical Oboe Concerto, plus his concertos for oboe d'amore and English horn, but also eight arrangements of well-known chorales for chorus and oboe. This serves the dual tasks of keeping the program interesting for the listener and challenging for Mayer, and it works brilliantly. With his apparently effortless virtuoso technique and his pungent but poignant tone, Mayer turns in soulful and stylish performances of the three concertos, plus sweetly spiritualized accounts of the chorales. The English Concert, the excellent English-based Baroque period orchestra, and Trinity Baroque, a very small but quite superb chorus, support Mayer's solos with graceful but heartfelt accompaniments, and Decca captures them in clean, warm, and open digital sound.