THE oboe, some trustrated commentator once remarked, is “an ill wind that nobody blows good.” But the lively baroque oboe is different from the hauntingly mournful instrument you hear, let us say, in Mahler’s works. Six Vivaldi oboe concertos, beautifully played for Sony by Hansjorg Schellenberger and the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, are evidence of this, for they swing beyond the contemporary instrument’s lonesome tones. The baroque, which for all too many listeners is associated solely with Johann Sebastian Bach, was a music of high optimism, even at its most solemn.
Gateway to Classical Music, a valuable eight-disc survey issued by EMI Classics, focuses in its Baroque Era disc not only on Bach but on Corelli, Purcell, Scarlatti, and Vivaldi. This disc offers a brief anthology of the music of that period, performed by a variety of musicians and singers out of EMI’s extensive archives. Meanwhile the survey’s Early Music disc presents selections from a period in music and in history, the Renaissance, which is too often approached in superficial terms. The Dark Ages were hardly as dark as pop history tells us, but the Renaissance was an unparalleled burst of intellectual energy and a liberation of the human spirit.
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