This album doesn't deliver any greatest hits at all, not even the arguably greatest hit of the contemporary repertory of oboe and ensemble, the Phantasy Quartet of
Benjamin Britten. The title comes from one of two works included by
Michael Finnissy, where it seems to refer to the four disparate but interlocking layers that make up the music: a Korean traditional melody in the oboe, a group of late Beethoven piano sonatas in the piano, a passage from
Mahler's Sixth Symphony in the percussion, and some incipits from Vivaldi's Four Seasons in the rest of the group. The title aside, it's an enjoyable group of contemporary English pieces. The divergence among these composers lies in how they treat the oboe and its relationship with the rest of the ensemble more than in general stylistic factors. The two works by Roger Redgate place the focus squarely on the oboe with considerable technical demands. Éperons (1988) is meant to evoke the "extreme situations" of free jazz playing in a composed context (i.e., the music does not involve actual jazz improvisation), an unusual idea. The oboe quintets of James Clarke and Christopher Fox, by contrast, integrate the oboe into the texture.
Finnissy's Ceci n'est pas une forme (2003) refers to a painting by René Magritte (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) and has the same kind of texture of independent but related lines as
Greatest Hits of All Time, although the title in this case is even more inscrutable. Oboist
Christopher Redgate confidently deals with an unusually wide variety of technical issues here, and the entire project ought to be in the collection of any wind player seeking to learn to hold an audience's attention with contemporary music.