Hansjorg Schellenberger has been principal oboist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the past 11 years and his distinctive style and tone are familiar from many a recording. Here he appears as soloist in three concertos with his colleagues under James Levine. His playing is of supreme elegance and although his tone is perhaps thinner, or at any rate slimmer, than we are accustomed to hear from British wind players, it is always pleasing and his breath-control is superb, enabling him to sustain legato passages to their full lyrical capacity.
The performance of the Mozart Concerto is big-band Mozart where the accompaniment is concerned, but Levine avoids heaviness and there is wit as well as affection in this well-recorded interpretation. Not for the first time, I wish that record companies would make it a rule to specify whose cadenzas are being played in concertos.
Concerto seems almost too grand a term to be applied to Bellini's student work in one movement. It lasts under six minutes, but within that span the future composer of ''Casta diva'' can easily be heard.
Undoubtedly, though, this disc will be sought out for the performance of the Strauss Concerto, with which Schellenberger obviously has a deep affinity. (He has written a study of ''Richard Strauss and the Oboe''.) It could be said that in the slow movement, both soloist and conductor succumb to the current tendency to over-sentimentalize Strauss by taking the music too slowly. But the playing here is so beautiful, the rapturous mood so well sustained, that all can be forgiven. It is a magical performance, not least because it emphasizes the Mozartian mood which engulfed Strauss in the last months of the Second World War. It seems to me one of the miracles of music in the twentieth century that the spirit of Mozart should have been summoned up, without a trace of pastiche, by Strauss at this terrible point in the world's and his own destiny. Listening to this performance, so beautifully played and recorded, one is profoundly thankful.'