Allegro
Adagio
Rondeau: Allegro

Mozart’s Oboe Quartet was written in Munich in 1781 with a particular player in mind: the oboist Friedrich Ramm (c.1744–1813). Ramm had been a member of the famous orchestra in Mannheim, where Mozart had first met him in 1777 and wrote very enthusiastically at the time about his playing and his ‘beautiful fine tone.’ Mozart arrived in Munich in late 1780 to prepare his new opera Idomeneo and Ramm was in the orchestra. Their admiration seems to have been mutual, since Ramm said of Idomeneo after an early rehearsal that no music had ever impressed him more deeply. According to at least one early catalogue of Mozart’s works (by Johann André), the Quartet was written during January 1781, while final preparations were being made for the première of Idomeneo on 29 January 1781.

The Oboe Quartet has been described by the oboist and musicologist Bruce Haynes as a ‘sparkling, ethereal work’. In three movements, and score for oboe, violin, viola and cello, it’s especially innovative in its exploitation of the oboe’s upper register – using notes that were only to be found on the latest models of oboe, and something of a Ramm speciality. Haynes has also noted that none of Mozart’s other works for oboe use the instrument’s highest notes in this way. The writing for the oboe is superbly idiomatic – and it’s intriguing to speculate (as Haynes has) that if Mozart had not met the brilliant clarinettist Anton Stadler after his move to Vienna (coincidentally, in the same year he composed the Oboe Quartet) – he might have written late masterpieces for solo oboe rather than for clarinet. The first movement is a breezy Allegro, while the slow movement suggests a slow, lyrical opera aria (making the most of Ramm’s singing tone). The finale is more unusual: a rondo that has passages where oboe and strings are playing in different time signatures (the oboe playing in 6/8 time while the strings are in 4/4) and makes the most of the virtuoso possibilities of the soloist.

NIGEL SIMEONE, 2010