A new oboe concerto by Eugene Zador received its first performance in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center on April 4, 1976. The soloist was Donald Leake, a professor of surgery at UCLA, and the orchestra was the Los Angeles Doctors' Orchestra conducted by Charles Blackman. The new work is in three movements:
I. Allegro
II. Andante, Allegretto, Andante
III. Rondo Finale:
Vivo
Zador began composing at the age of 13 and entered the Vienna Conservatory at 16. He was a pupil of Reder and studied musicology with Abert, Schering and Volbach. He received a Ph.D. in 1921 and the following year was appointed to the faculty of the Vienna Conservatory. In 1934, he won the Hungarian National Prize for composition and in 1935 became honorary professor of the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. Zador came to the United States in 1939 and settled in Los Angeles in 1940. He was on the staff at Metro Golden Mayer Motion Picture Studios for a number of years.
Zador has produced a large body of music, all of it far removed from the 20th century compositional styles, fads, and experiments. Enos Shupp, writing in High Fidelity magazine, comments that Zador's music itself is not complicated, abounds in Hungarian folk sound, which is to say that the inspiration has come from folk music but is original in content. Winthrop Sargeant, writing in the New Yorker, said "Eugene Zador is one of the most important composers to come out of Hungary since Bela Bartok. His style of composition, which reminds one of Bartok, is non-serial and easy to take, and he is given to elaborate but tightly knit forms and extraordinarily imaginative orchestration."
The oboe concerto bears out these contentions. It is a lyric work, ideally placed for the oboe and full of wit and charm. Although Zador is an Hungarian by birth, the oboe concerto could have as easily had its roots in Americana. It is a welcome addition to the repertory. It will be published by Belwin-Mills in New York this fall.