The Spanish oboist Cristina Gómez Godoy (b1990) was a member of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra for many years, as well as a busy orchestral and chamber musician and soloist. Now she steps out from the ranks of her erstwhile band for a coupling that isn’t perhaps as common on disc as the repertoire might suggest: the two pre-eminent oboe concertos of their respective ages.

Gómez Godoy’s tone is rich and velvety, and ideally suited to the ecstatic, songful outpouring of Strauss’s 1945 Oboe Concerto. Daniel Barenboim is an alert and sympathetic accompanist, too, guiding his predominantly young players with a sure hand born of his decades of experience. Whether by design or not in this reading, here and there you catch particularly telling aural glimpses of the concerto’s kinship with the Four Last Songs, composed only a few years later at the end of Strauss’s long life.

The disc opens, though, with Mozart’s 1777 Oboe Concerto. Barenboim’s approach here is not so different from that of his Strauss, with a string section that is (or sounds) larger than currently fashionable and a tempo that, while not slow, is hardly at the athletic end of the scale. It’s almost as if the historically informed movement had passed him by (maybe it had); compare Claudio Abbado in his lithe, slimmed-down backing for Lucas Macías Navarro with the Orchestra Mozart (Claves, 2/15) for something with a pinch more pep and a degree more orchestral clarity. But that isn’t Barenboim’s style, and his accompaniment proves more than amenable to Gómez Godoy’s commanding reading of the work and a fine match for her full-cream tone. Anyway, Strauss revered Mozart, so perhaps he would have conducted the work this way himself.

The documentation doesn’t explicitly state that these are recordings taken from concerts (Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal, July and August 2019) but there is a feeling of ‘liveness’ to the sound as captured, not to mention occasional noises off (mostly undistracting) and the click of the oboe’s metalwork in faster passages.