PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS of Eugene Goossens’s Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra

Statement of the problem. The study of the process of development of the concert style of oboe performance is a relevant area of modern musicology, as evidenced, in particular, by the scientific activity of the International Double Reed Society (IDRS) and works of other researchers on the history of the instrument and its repertoire starting with the second half of the 20 century (Bate, 1975; Bartalozzi, 1967; Reeves & Hooper, 1985; Goossens & Roxburgh, 2001). The concept of “concert oboe” is actualized by V. Martynova (2018, 2019) on the basis of the performance art of the 19th – 20th centuries. As for works for oboe of the early 20th century, in particular by E. Goossens, there are a few studies devoted to the development of modern style of the concert oboe (Del Mar, 1984; Lopez-Pelaez-Casellas & Garcia-Herrera, 2019) and to E. Goossens’s Concerto (Woodworth, 2016). This determines the scientific novelty of this research, which involves genre-style and performance analysis of the Concerto. The purpose of this study is to identify typical genre-stylistic and performance characteristics of E. Goossens’s composition in the context of the development of the concert style of oboe performance. The research methodology is based, first, on the genre and style approach, which is traditional for musicology, in particular, on research on the code of reflexivity (Shapovalova, 2006), and pastoral genre in music (Shapovalova, Chernyavska, Govorukhina & Nikolaievska, 2021). Another methodological dimension is related to the positions of analytical interpretology and principles of performance analysis (Nikolaievska, 2020), which focus on such elements as form-creation, performance dramaturgy, performance poetics. Results and conclusions. The typical genre and stylistic features of E. Goossens’composition refer to the traditions of the romantic concerto (onemovement structure; the presence of a symphonic model of the genre; the use of initial intonation as the main sound symbol of the work; the absence of a single tonal centre; reflexivity; the involvement of pastoral colour as an established image of the instrument). From the viewpoint of performance poetics we have marked the overcoming of the formality of rondeau nature by the continuity of performance form-creation; the presence of such difficulties requiring high performance skills of an oboist as playing of whole-tone scale, high notes and extreme sounds of the registers, polyrhythmic structures, the abundance of virtuoso passages in the composition, the variety of articulation techniques, fast-frequency vibrato, etc., which is crucial in the process of development of the concert style of oboe performance in the early 20th century.