Bach and Oboe – a personal, secret relationship What made her decide to be an oboist, Celine Moinet is often asked. It had to be woodwind. Not brass, not a string instrument, not the piano. “I began with the recorder in the usual way. Until I switched to the oboe when I was seven, I didn’t know the instrument at all.” Her parents did not influence her in any way. “Even today I find that the oboe is hardly known. Maybe that’s because it is very complex,” says the French artist. When Johann Sebastian Bach was alive, the instrument was much in favour at princely courts and in church music. The sacred and secular repertoire that has been preserved in many places across Europe, not least in the central German region of Saxony and Thuringia, proves that beyond doubt. “Bach’s cantatas were where it began for me. They are a rich, challenging source of music for oboists, ultimately the essence of his oeuvre. You can see the oboe as a narrator in his works.” On her new CD, Celine Moinet links cantata movements with concertos that pose a special challenge of their own: “technically virtuosic, with simply unending passages of elaboration, giving you scarcely a chance to breathe.” She is thinking of pieces like the D minor Concerto BWV 1059 reconstructed from surviving fragments. It places formidable technical and physical demands upon oboists. Bach takes more time than most other composers, of that Celine Moinet is convinced. Celine was just a girl when she first heard the Marcello concerto, with its famous second movement in the arrangement by Bach. It was a long held wish of hers to play the concerto herself. “I connect strong childhood memories with it.” It is her fourth CD and the first that the solo oboist of the Dresden Staatskapelle has recorded with orchestra. The question of the accompaniment exercised her mind at an early stage. She had to consider such issues as these: “What makes better sense for me, what does the music call for? Werner Erhardt, director of the orchestra l’arte del mondo, spent a long time working on the programme with me. He contributed a lot of useful suggestions. We gradually converged,” recalls Celine Moinet in describing the development of an interpretation, a process that convinced her of one thing: “Bach is the most difficult. Maybe I shall play him differently in 20 years’ time. The view I take now is a stage in the story of my life. It shows my strengths, as well as my doubts, my continuing search.” She is familiar with the business of making a recording, but even here, Bach is different. “When you play this music, it takes you to limits you were unaware of,” says Celine Moinet. It constantly prompts new decisions about performance practice, particularly about ornamentation. The l’arte del mondo orchestra works with Baroque bows, oriented on the historical practice. “We think our style of playing has brought us very close to Bach.” In the opening Sinfonia to the cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” BWV 12, dating from...