Consummate Skill Music for newly designed oboes - impresses PATRIC STANDFORD '... as fascinating and challenging as it is revelatory.'

Christopher Redgate has spent the last three years working on the redesign of the oboe's key structure, with the result that a new instrument has been born, built in collaboration with the British oboe makers Howarth of London. The new instrument is the Howarth-Redgate 21st Century Oboe, and this CD, the first volume of a planned series, introduces the instrument with music specially created by composers who have a particularly close association with Redgate and with exploratory music.Technical developments in the nineteenth century transformed the instrument considerably to produce the modern oboe with which we have become familiar. The four movements of Roxburgh's piece are no simple showcase of gymnastics, but a carefully crafted work of sensitivity and consummate skill that are a just reward, not only for Redgate's three-year Research Fellowship at the Royal Academy of Music, but of his thirty years of exploration, collaboration with many composers and other notable performers (like Roxburgh himself), and a range of work as an eminent performer of music of all styles and periods...

MICHAEL FINNISSY

ROYAL ACADEMY OF MUSIC

LONDON

UNITED KINGDOM