The cackling oboe – sometimes considered an “ugly duckling” of the woodwind family – had a loyal benefactor in Bruno Maderna. The Italian composer’s three concertos show him keeping unshakable faith, expanding the instrument’s expressive spectrum and devising orchestral timbres and structures that ingeniously telescoped outwards from its acoustic fundamentals. German oboist Fabian Menzel clearly relishes the rare opportunity to explore these seminal works, and the alert backings of the Saarbrücken RSO have been caught with pristine clarity from mainly live performances.

Maderna has largely been overshadowed by his contemporaries Nono, Boulez and Stockhausen, but even the First Concerto, written in the heyday of Darmstadt modernism, showcases a distinctive voice. His oboe writing artfully contains within it the discipline of Webern and the angular lyricism of Berg, but most impressive is how the oboe material trickles down to the rest of the orchestra who studiously chew over its ramifications. The Second Concerto (1967) takes these principles and runs with them. Fidgety oboe gesticulations are shadowed by a carpet of pointillistic percussion strokes, while Maderna keeps the music in a constant state of exposition. But lest you doubt who’s boss, the oboe sporadically reasserts its dominance and the orchestra dutifully mirror its contours.

Maderna died suddenly in 1973, leaving the Third Concerto as his valedictory statement. The piece is the most tonally anchored of the set, with the oboe elongating lines that push ever further against the structural matrix. The oboist begins with a tiny falsetto squeak, and at the other end of the scale the orchestra rages with explosive rhetoric – the most sonically varied of the concertos for sure, but always governed by Maderna’s refinement of gesture.

Written in 1939, Nikos Skalkottas’s Oboe Sonata – the opening gambit of Burkhard Glaetzner and Hansjacob Staemmler’s recital disc – anticipates Maderna’s post-Schoenbergian overhaul of the oboe. Glaetzner can sound shrill and mannered after hearing Menzel, but Skalkottas’s bold, no-nonsense vocabulary has retained its crispness. Stefan Wolpe’s monochrome Sonata has weathered less well but Krenek’s piece is characteristically resourceful. I’m also partial to the anarchy of Friedrich Goldmann’s 1980 Sonata, while the dignified charm of Hans Erich Apostel’s solo Sonatina feels satisfyingly rooted.