Nine compact discs and two DVDs. That’s a lot of real estate to ask any single instrument to fill, and the oboe — gorgeous, cantankerous, perpetually on the edge of going wrong — might seem the least likely candidate for such a monument. But Han de Vries earns every inch of it.
Born in The Hague in 1941, de Vries came up through one of the great dynasties in wind playing: first Jaap Stotijn, then Haakon, whose death in 1964 left the principal oboe chair of the Concertgebouw Orchestra suddenly, devastatingly vacant. De Vries, barely in his twenties, stepped in. What followed — seven years in that seat, then a balance of solo work and membership in the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, then a restless curiosity that pulled him toward modern scores on one side and baroque instruments on the other — shaped a performer of genuinely unusual range. The Dutch School he came to represent is a hybrid creature, Franco-German in its foundations, but the defining characteristic is something harder to categorize: a sound that is unmistakably personal, warm without being thick, precise without the clinical chill that can make some German playing feel like surgery.
The radio broadcasts gathered here span decades, and the variety is frankly startling.
The opening disc plants its flag squarely in Bach — both the father and the difficult, misunderstood son. The Concerto BWV 1053, recorded live in 1991 with Jan Willem conducting, is the third time de Vries committed this work to tape, and familiarity has done it no harm. Compared to his earlier studio traversals from 1966 and 1979, this one moves with a kind of wiry confidence — leaner, less inclined to linger. There are moments when the slow movement seems to breathe on its own, the oboe line suspended above the strings like something weightless. A 1985 tape pairs de Vries with Elly Ameling in Cantata No. 84, Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Glücke — and whatever one thinks of the theological cheerfulness of the text, hearing Ameling’s voice in this repertoire remains one of life’s reliable pleasures. Her sound had that quality of plush inevitability, as if the notes had always been there waiting for her. The Concerto for violin and oboe, taped in the Concertgebouw in 1974 with Alberto Lysy directing his Camerata, is less satisfying — Lysy’s orchestra produces pizzicati that keep intruding at the wrong volume, and the acoustic is soft-edged in a way that blurs detail. The CPE Bach concerto, with John Lubbock on the podium, is easy and appealing, though CPE rewards a slightly more angular sensibility.
Disc two is where things get interesting in a different way.
Malcolm Arnold’s oboe concerto was written for Eugene Goossens — a fact worth pausing over, since Goossens brought to everything he played a combination of aristocratic finish and barely suppressed wildness. De Vries finds his own way in: the caprice is there, the promenade warmth alternating with something more mercurial and fleet. Jean Françaix’s L’Horloge de Flore — those eight little horological character pieces, each named for a flower that opens at a specific hour — suits de Vries almost perfectly. He follows the sketches with a deftness that never tips into cuteness, which is the constant danger with Françaix. The Ibert Symphonie concertante, with David Zinman conducting at the Concertgebouw in 1973, is a genuine discovery for anyone who doesn’t know it — athletic, structurally alert, something between a concerto grosso and a brass-band showpiece gone unexpectedly refined. Zinman and de Vries play it with real conviction. Bert Esser’s Concerto for two oboes brings in Bart Schneemann as partner, and together they navigate this tart, pungent work with the kind of selfless ensemble listening that’s harder than it looks — especially in the slow movement, where the two instruments trade something that sounds almost like loneliness.
What accumulates across nine discs is a portrait of a musician who never stopped asking what the instrument could do — not in the showy, look-at-me sense, but in the deeper sense of repertoire, of color, of historical awareness. De Vries took the oboe seriously as a vehicle for ideas. That’s rarer than it should be.
This set is not for casual browsing. It rewards sustained attention and some tolerance for radio-broadcast sonics that vary from disc to disc. But as a document of a major artist in his prime — and in his later, more reflective decades — it is indispensable. Strongly recommended.
