Introducing Haydn's Oboe

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:03][music] >> This is the kind of oboe that Haydn would have recognized and wrote for.

[00:00:21]And there's something really nice about playing on it for his music. It kind of somehow gets us closer to the source, if you see what I mean. They're made from boxwood like the baroque oboe and a wood found very commonly in northern Europe and quite kind of dense and hard. Um, it also has a really nice soft round sound.

[00:00:41]The classical oboe uses many of the same fingerings as the baroque oboe. We do have an extra octave key here, which the baroque oboe doesn't have. Um, but we use a similar combination of long fingerings and cross fingerings. So, the scale isn't particularly even, but the sound is quirky and interesting.

[00:00:59]Throughout the baroque period and into the classical period, the writing for oboe changes and it becomes more and more a solo instrument in its own right. Um, the changes that this shows in the classical instrument is that the higher register becomes more important. The bore of the instrument becomes narrower, so the sound becomes more focused and slightly more piercing, so it can carry over the whole of the orchestra much better. The classical oboes I play on in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment are made by Dick Earl. Um, Dick for many years was second oboe with the orchestra and he's a fantastic man, uh, marvelous oboe player and just a beautiful instrument maker.

[00:01:38]Um, so I'm really lucky to have two of his instruments that I play on regularly. Sadly for us oboists, the stress that the wood of the instrument is subjected to changes in temperature, all the condensation and frankly the spit that we put down the instrument unintentionally, of course, with the breath, means that they don't tend to last that long. Um, Dick always says that it's very difficult finding good instruments to copy because the one the instruments that were good were played and played and played until they were basically just for the rubbish bin.

[00:02:09]And the ones that weren't very good were probably the ones that have survived that were in the back of someone's drawer or under someone's bed. The oboes that Dick makes are copies of the instruments made by Mr. Flot of Dresden.

[00:02:21]This one dates from about 1780, the original.

[00:02:25]This later oboe of the classical period was also made by Mr. Flot and dates from 1807, the last year of his life.

[00:02:32]Incidentally, two years before the death of Haydn.

[00:02:35]You can see it's got many more keys than the earlier oboe.

[00:02:40]Side keys here, a left-hand flat key here, G sharp key here, and all kinds of things down here.

[00:02:48]Now that makes some things easier to play. It makes the scale of the oboe the up and down more even. It loses some of the quirks of the earlier instrument, but it heralds the more chromaticism as we move into the early romantic period.

[00:03:15]>> [music] [music] >> There's no doubt that playing instruments like these are are more challenging than playing modern instruments. I come from a modern background.

[00:03:34]So it was it was a real challenge getting my head around the kind of the hey, well that's a B flat. What? That's crazy. And when I started playing these instruments, it was interesting cuz friends of mine that came to hear me play in orchestras, they would say to me like it sounds completely different, but it still sounds like you somehow. Which was a really nice thing and I kind of took that on board. I always feel that playing these instruments is like doing a tightrope walk without any kind of safety net.