Oboists have long treasured the one concerto (K314 in C major) that Mozart composed for their instrument, even if they have to contest its ownership with flautists, who play it in the key of D major in the version that the composer subsequently produced. But there were many others in Austria and Bohemia in the second half of the 18th century who wrote oboe concertos, and Albrecht Mayer has unearthed four of them. They are all pleasant pieces, mostly high-spirited, which do everything that oboists of that era would have expected from a concerto – though one of them, the C major work by Joseph Fiala (1748-1816), is for cor anglais rather than oboe. There are no great discoveries here, though the concerto by Franz Anton Hoffmeister (1754-1812), who was the founder of an important Viennese music-publishing house as well as a composer, is distinctly a cut above the others. Mayer performs them with the suave elegance and sustained beauty of tone you would expect from the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal oboe, but the string accompaniments from the Kammerakademie Potsdam are disappointing, and lack the rhythmic spring and transparency this unassuming music really needs.
