Heinz Holliger, Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gary Bertini - Bruno Maderna: The Oboe Concertos (1994)

The oboe was a special instrument for Bruno Maderna, and he filled these three concertos (composed in 1962-3, 1967 and 1973) with solo lines in which sharply fragmented and fluently rhapsodic materials constantly interact. Heinz Holliger, in turn, pours all his unrivalled dexterity and capacity for infinitely varied expressive nuance into the performances here. Yet the music remains problematic.
Perhaps it would be better to say that the concerto form remained problematic for Maderna. Though he relished ringing the changes in the ways in which the oboe and its various close relatives musette, oboe d'amore, cor anglais could be played, and devised a host of imaginative orchestral contexts which set off the soloist to best advantage, the forms as such never seem to advance beyond a rather primitive succession of improvisatory episodes. Neither large-scale contrast nor steadily accumulating expressive tension are high priorities.
The First Concerto finds Maderna fascinated by the possibilities of translating electronic sounds into purely orchestral textures, while the Second and Third reflect the impact of those mobile structures, and graphic notations, which a range of European composers from Lutoslawski to Boulez employed to such memorable avant-garde purpose in the 1960s. Maderna was responding to important innovations without, in these works, at least, adding very much of his own to them.
The recordings are technically excellent, giving natural prominence to the soloist while still conveying the full range of the often exotic colours to be heard in the orchestral accompaniments. Maderna could not have wished for more distinguished advocacy.