Costa Records was set up by the Berlin-based oboist Nigel Shore to release chamber music and Brazilian jazz. Its first chamber disc features Shore as part of the group he founded 30 years ago with fellow members of the Berlin Philharmonic. Dedicated to Colin Matthews for his 70th birthday, it includes Matthews’ two oboe quartets from the 1980s, the second of which was written for the Berlin Oboe Quartet, alongside the early Phantasy Quartet by Benjamin Britten (for whom Matthews worked as an assistant in the 1970s) and works by Richard Rodney Bennett and Helen Grime.
All five are single-movement works, which in their contrasting ways hark back to the notion of the “phantasy”, as revived in British music at the beginning of the 20th century for the Cobbett chamber music prize, in which a succession of movement types is contained within a single musical span. The role of the oboe in these works can be a concertante one, as it is in the Britten to some extent, in the seamlessly overlapping variations of the second Matthews work and in Grimes’s wonderfully conceived and strikingly written piece. Or it can be an equal partner in an authentic chamber music dialogue, as it is in Bennett’s 1974 piece in which the four instruments take their turns in the spotlight. Altogether this is a thoroughly rewarding collection, superbly played and recorded.
