Paul Goodwin here plays a modern copy of a 1785 oboe by Carl Augustin Grenser, one of the greatest wind instrument makers of the day. It has a sweet, rich, clear tone – at any rate in Goodwin’s hands, for it is too often forgotten in the ‘authentic’ arguments that players’ tone could obviously vary as much as it does today. The lower register is lucid and warm; the long high A which opens the slow movement is beautifully poised against the strings; and the top Fs are full and accurate. These were high for their day, and Friedrich Ramm, for whom Mozart wrote his quartet, was among the first players to use them regularly, though there were others (Ludwig Lebrun used to perform in this region in obbligato with his wife Franziska Danzi, one of the singers whose top Fs may have inspired Mozart’s Queen of Night).
The performance is fresh and unaffected, with some individual ideas that work well especially given the nature of the instrument’s tone and agility (the work is not among the most difficult in the repertory to play, at any rate with a modern oboe, but Mozart is always difficult to play well). The other works make pleasant listening, and in the F major Quartet by Louis Massonneau there is particular charm in the Adagio and a nice inventive wit in the final variations, too often a cop-out with minor eighteenth-century composers. An enjoyable disc.'