Iain Farrington on his arrangement of Strauss’s Oboe Concerto

At our season finale at St John’s Smith Square on 20 April, we’ll be playing Iain Farrigton’s chamber arrangement of Strauss’s Concerto for Oboe. Read on to find out what Iain has to say about the piece’s history as well as his arrangement of the piece.

The Oboe Concerto by Richard Strauss is a work far removed from the realities of its compositional period. Written in 1945 after the end of the Second World War, much of Europe was devastated, traumatised and broken. Strauss conveyed a huge sense of this loss in his Metamorphosen for strings. With the Oboe Concerto, Strauss’s music belongs to a different world, one of serenity, contentment, playfulness and order. The mood almost belongs to Mozart, in its purity and sunny major-keys. Strauss had been inspired to compose the piece after a conversation with the American oboist John de Lancie, who was stationed as a soldier near Strauss’s Bavarian home. There was no commission for the work, so Strauss was composing both for pleasure and perhaps for escape. The original orchestration is one of his smallest, with a handful of woodwinds, horns, and strings. There is barely a hint of the enormous forces of Strauss’s largest works. This lightness of timbre is ideal for balancing with the oboe, but also matches the intimate nature of the music. It seems to evoke the realms of chamber music, which is the basis of this arrangement. Mozart’s Oboe Quartet is an obvious template for a reduced scoring, as well as the versions of Mozart’s Piano Concertos with string quartet. Small-scale domestic music making was a rich and plentiful pursuit in the Classical period, and many composers of the time provided outstanding pieces for this purpose. The Strauss Oboe Concerto carries many of the same characteristics of this genre, with a positive and cheerful disposition. This arrangement for small ensemble maintains all of the original harmonic, melodic and contrapuntal material, here re-worked for a group of string players. Strauss’s light scoring means that very little is lost from the texture, and an extra clarity is gained, especially with the inner parts. One major difference in performance is the absence of a conductor, making the piece a genuine chamber work. The players listen and respond to each other directly, allowing extra flexibility and spontaneity. It also allows more oboists to perform this great work and to experience its sense of shared enjoyment.

(c) Iain Farrington, 2024

Iain Farrington is a pianist, organist, composer and arranger. You can find out more about him by going to https://www.iainfarrington.com/.

To hear Iain’s arrangement of Strauss’s oboe concerto, join us on 20 April at St John’s Smith Square for Transformed Lives.