Thomas Gallant presented a recital sponsored by the concert Artists Guild on January 6, 1986. Andrew Porter wrote the following account of the program in The New Yorker. It is reprinted with permission.)

Andrew Porter

Thomas Gallant gave a short, lively recital entitled, "The New Oboe" in Carnegie Recital Hall this month. The new oboe is not the plangent, pastoral instrument heard piping its slow ditty in the country scene of Berlioz's Fantastic Symphony. It chirps and chatters, bubbles and bounces. It's the instrument Elliott Carter wrote for in the Sandpiper song of his Elizabeth Bishop cycle. Mr. Gallant's program began with Heinz Holliger's Study 11 (1982), which opens on one of the oboe's highest notes, drops to the lowest, and runs the range of new, "unnatural" sounds, undreamed of by those who designed the instrument, which modern players have learned to coax from it. In Harvey Sollberger's Two Oboes Troping (1963), Mr. Gallant was joined by Claudia Coonce, and the pair suggested two birds pecking and chortling merrily over a basket of delicious nuts. Gilbert Amy's Jeux (1970), for one to four oboes, was done in a three-oboe version - Marilyn Coyne joined the ensemble - and the trio became the Macbeth witches in unmalicious vein, cackling and gossiping volubly over each subject that came up. There was both brilliance and lyricism in Luciano Berio's Sequenza VII (1969), for solo oboe against a pedal B (supplied from the wings by Miss Coonce and Miss Coyne). Berio uses "multiphonics" - those faint chordal squawks whose pitches seldom sound convinced - in a musing, poetical manner. Eleven strings from the Group for Contemporary Music, conducted by Anthony Korf, then joined Mr. Gallant for Berio's Chemins IV on Sequenza VII (1975) - the earlier solo cradled in an intricate web of string counterpoints. The performance was billed as a New York premiere. So was that of Krzysztof Penderecki's Capriccio (1965), also for oboe and eleven strings - a work of sixties avant-garde which has stayed fresh. Mr. Gallant is a player who unites technical mastery with intentness, charm, and wit. This was an unusual and attractive recital.

The students of Laila Storch presented all six of Handel's sonatas for 2 oboes at the University of Washington in Seattle on November 24, 1985. Oboists participating were Karen Anderson, Ailene Munger, David Barnes, Tracy Russell, Tad Margelli, and Catherine Taylor. They were assisted by harpsichordists Geisa Dutra, Matthew Kulbacki, and Peter Mack; Joseph Bichsel provided the cello continuo for the program.

John Mack performed the Mozart Concerto, K. 314 with the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting, on January 16, 17, and 18. He will also perform with the orchestra on eight occasions during the orchestra's European tour in February (in London, Brussels, Bern, twice in Vienna, Dusseldorf, Bonn, and Frankfurt). Robert Finn, writing in the Plain Dealer said of Mack's playing: "... the piece was done with virtuoso expertness, phrasing nicely even while pumping out long strings of scales, runs and complex figurations at the no-nonsense tempos Dohnanyi laid down... his performance was technically superb and stylistically appropriate. The cadenzas in each of the three movements were his own; they managed to show off his technique without straying too far from Mozart's world. Not even the long strings of notes in which Mozart seemed loath to give his soloist (whether flute or oboe) time to breathe seemed to bother Mack. He just tootled through them as if their physical and technical problems did not exist."

Claude Villevieille, oboist and Pierre Bouyer, keyboard presented a recital at the Hotel Saint-Aignan in Paris on May 10, 1985. The program included sonatas of Sammartini, Yvon (for English horn), and J.C.M. Widerkehr, Marin Marais' Couplets sur les "Folies d'Espagne " ' Telemann's Suite in E Minor (for oboe d'amore and continuo) and Onslow's Andantino for oboe and piano. M. Villevieille is a prize-winner of the international competition for chamber music playing of Martigny in Switzerland, and is active as soloist throughout France and abroad - Switzerland, Poland, Hong Kong. With Pierre Bouyer he has been presenting recitals exploiting the rich repertoire available for their instruments.

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