So who is Celia Nicklin? Beats me, but she is responsible for my getting up before five o'clock this morning.
I awoke at 4:20; although I normally have no trouble falling back to sleep at such an hour, today the process was taking a little longer, so I turned on the radio to distract my mind. I came in on the tail end of a Chopin piano piece, then heard the next selection announced: Johann Vanhal's Symphony in g minor. You all know Vanhal, right? Neither do I. Nor had I heard of the London Mozart Players. Perhaps I'm just ignorant; perhaps there's good reason: in any case, I was back asleep after only a few bars.Until I awoke to the sound of an oboe. Somewhere in the middle of the piece there's a long oboe solo—so long that I wondered if I'd slept through the whole symphony and we were now on to some oboe concerto. Perhaps it was the sound of the oboe that aroused me; what kept me awake was the quality. It was gorgeous! Smooth, flowing, light tone, with none of the harshness I've come to associate with the European oboe style. Unbelievably gentle phrase endings, even on high notes. The music itself was actually rather uninspiring, but I couldn't stop listening to the way it was played. London orchestra or not, I was sure the soloist had to be an American, or at least American-trained, and was probably someone I'd heard of.
Needless to say, there was no hope of sleep after that. I stayed awake to discover the truth—it was, indeed, still the Vanhal—and to do some Internet research to find the name of the oboist. And to find out that she is English-born and English/German trained, and I'd never heard of her. So I was wrong—but I wasn't wrong about her sound, and I'd like to hear her on a more interesting piece of music.
