The late American oboist Josef Marx is best remembered as a founder of the music publishing firm, McGinnis and Marx, while his substantial accomplishments as performer and scholar have never received wide recognition. These publications present a balanced perspective of his "other" careers, and should help to stimulate further interest in the life and work of this unusual musician.
"Josef Marx Plays the Oboe" presents performances of four works that were personal favorites of Mr. Marx -- the Schumann Romances, Platti's Sonata in C minor, a Telemann Trio Sonata, and the Krebs Fantasie for oboe and organ. Recorded over a span of 25 years, this record presents a view of the artist's performances over an unusually broad expanse of time.
Far and away the most impressive performance on the album is the Schumann, played with pianist Irene Grau and taken from a Concert Hall recording of the early 1950s. Nowhere else is Mr. Marx' sensitive articulation, attention to detail and nuance, and extraordinary control of phrasing and breath as evident as in this most difficult piece from the oboe's repertoire. For example, the treacherous ending of the first Romance is without apparent pause for breath or evidence of circle breathing anywhere in the final 16 bars. This performance, with its pure and flowing tone, perfectly controlled vibrato, and impeccable pitch, displays Marx' skills at their peak, and will be of more than a little interest to serious students of the oboe who undertake to learn the Romances.
Following the Schumann is an offering from the McGinnis and Marx catalogue, Giovanni Platti's Sonata in C minor (mislabeled on the album as G minor). Platti, a Paduan by birth, moved to Germany and became court composer in Wurzburg in 1724. His versatility as a musician -- adept on oboe, violin, and cello in addition to keyboard and voice -- led to the composition of many chamber works for a variety of solo instruments. This one, here recorded for the first time, appears to be his only composition now commercially available.
That is a distinct pity, for if this four movement Sonata is typical of his works, Platti was a gifted composer. His fast movements bounce and sparkle, while the two adagios display a keen understanding of the oboe's capacity for pathos and melancholy. Overall, the Sonata is as worthy of performance as are the solo oboe sonatas of Handel.
Recorded live in the Brooklyn Museum in 1965, this recording does not do justice to the soloist, the composer, or to pianist Sibyl Belmont. The sound is distinctly tinny, although this is somewhat compensated for by the energy and sensitivity of the performance. Discounting the problems with timbre (and the inevitable glitches inherent in a live recording) one can appreciate Marx' devotion to this music, especially in his elegant embellishments, which are never overdone.
Telemann's Trio Sonata for recorder and oboe, recorded with Bernard Krainis, recorder; Paul Maynard, harpsichord; and Morris Newman, bassoon, is taken from an MCA/Kapp album of the early 1960s. Happily, the quality of recording and reproduction are quite high, presenting the music in an inherently more favorable light than was the case with the Platti.
There is little to criticize here. Like the Schumann, it displays Marx as an oboist of consummate skill and beauty of interpretation. Mr. Krainis plays his alto recorder with as much finesse and elan as any contemporary flutist, balancing the soft sound of his "simple" instrument nicely with the modern oboe. The continuo players are appropriately prominent but never overwhelming. All in all, a more successful rendition would be hard to come by.
The final selection, Krebs' hauntingly beautiful Fantasie, is the weakest on the album. Recorded live in Bath, England in 1978, it features a marvelous, lyrical realization of the organ part by pianist Walter Klauss. Unfortunately, there are serious problems of intonation and tonal control in the oboe part, which make the overall effect of the piece difficult to appreciate.
An interesting companion to this album is an anthology, The Writings of Josef Marx. Compiled and edited by Gloria Ziegler, this 160 page soft cover volume was published in 1983 by McGinnis and Marx. It contains eight essays, liner notes from several recordings, and transcripts of a number of lectures. Dating from 1950 to 1976, these works cover about the same chronologic span as the record, and display the same insight, subtlety, and attention to detail that the better of those performances exhibit. Like the record, this book is subtitled as Volume One.
Most of the essays concern the history or attributes of wind instruments, with the oboe being appropriately singled out for attention. Mr. Marx was one of the first American musicians to develop a performing competence on the Baroque oboe, an interest which arose naturally out of his collection of old instruments and his research into their capabilities. "The Tone of the Baroque Oboe", a completely theoretical derivation and description of that instrument's expressive capabilities, stands with "Is Old Music Expressive" and "Preliminary Report on the Baroque Oboe" as examples of his early work -- both practical and scholarly -- in this field. The latter essay especially shows his devotion to the cause of archaic instruments, describing the experience of a 1955 televised concert that featured comparative performances on old and new instruments, of the Sinfonia to Bach's Cantata 152. Speaking of the boxwood oboe, he notes:
There is a great satisfaction in playing on an instrument which is not mechanized, where the feel of the naked wood is still on your fingertips and where the basic scale is the direct outcome of the acoustics of the elementary tube. An immediacy springs up between the player and the music which is missed in the instrument of today.
Several other essays describe the Baroque trumpet, notable Baroque and modern musicians (including Carl Heinrich Graun, composer of two trios for oboe d'amore, horn, and bassoon which have lately come into vogue), problems of American musical instrument collections, his personal philosophy of performance, and an "Introduction to Some Fundamental Concepts of Organology", a fascinating and somewhat speculative lecture relating the development of wind, string, and percussion instruments to religion, magic, and sexuality. The various liner notes, written for Mercury records of circa 1955, discuss the historical and musical circumstances of compositions by Mozart, Haydn, Schumann, and Liszt.
Marx was at his best when writing about his own instrument, the modern oboe. "Battlepage", taken from the November 1953 Woodwind Magazine, is his argument for the cultivation of double tonguing and circular breathing on the oboe, in response to Evelyn Rothwell's claim, (in her then new book Oboe Technique), that these techniques were untenable. Time seems to have borne out his position, which is essential to the development of the modern virtuoso oboist.
Most enjoyable, however, is his refutation of the myth of the oboe being "an ill wind that no one blows good". Although he concedes,
That the three-hundred year old panorama of oboe players is speckled here and there by an odd-ball and a crank cannot, of course, be denied. Our own musical scene boasts of a few which propriety and the libel laws alone keep me from mentioning by name,
he presents an "Ill Wind" a history of prominent oboists from Fischer (born 1733) to Dandois, Labate, and Tabuteau, proving that those who play the most fickle of woodwinds tend to live longer, if not happier, than their fellow musicians -- a point ironically belied by his own death at age 65. A more engaging bit of scholarship would be hard to concoct.
Overall, then, this volume presents Marx as a scholar of unusual perception, willing to dig deep into original sources but never removed more than a few steps from the reality of performance. The book was a pleasure to read, and makes this reviewer wish he had had the opportunity to know its author.
Both "Josef Marx Plays the Oboe" and The Writings of Josef Marx are available only from:
Diero Music Headquarters
123 Greenwich Avenue
New York, NY 10014