The Concerto for Oboe and Strings in D minor, attributed to Alessandro Marcello, is one of the most performed oboe concertos in the repertory. It was written in the early 18th century and has become Marcello's most famous work. Bach wrote a keyboard transcription of the concerto.

The Oboe Concerto in D minor, S D935, is an early 18th-century concerto for oboe, strings and continuo attributed to the Venetian composer Alessandro Marcello. The earliest extant manuscript containing Johann Sebastian Bach's solo keyboard arrangement of the concerto, BWV 974, dates from around 1715. As a concerto for oboe, strings and continuo its oldest extant sources date from 1717: that year it was printed in Amsterdam, and a C minor variant of the concerto, S Z799, was written down.

Bach's keyboard version was published as an arrangement of a concerto by Antonio Vivaldi in the 19th century. In 1923 the C minor version of the oboe concerto was published as a composition by Benedetto Marcello, Alessandro's brother. In the second half of the 20th century several publications indicated Alessandro again as the composer of the piece, as it had been in its early 18th-century print, and the oboe concerto was again published in its D minor version.

"Air on a G String" is taken from the second movement of Johan Sebastian Bach's orchestral suite No 3 in D major. I have arranged it in A because it feels, sits and sounds right to my ear. The piano accompaniment is no more than intermediate.

The Easy Concert Pieces series .for Violin and Piano is intended for tuition purposes and are particularly suitable for performance at auditions and school concerts, for competitions, examinations . - and for music making at home too, of course. Volume 3 (intermediate) requires familiarity with the first four positions.
Besides well-known works such as the famous Air by Bach, the Largo from Handel's opera 'Xerxes' and a movement from Vivaldi's Four Seasons, there are rewarding concerto and sonata movements by Kuchler and Fiocco, as well as less familiar Romantic compositions by Rieding and Trowell. .Modern music is represented in two lovely pieces by Hermann Schroeder, also inspired by the theme of the seasons. . Young violinists will enjoy the four pop pieces that round off the selection

When Ligeti taught composition at the University of Stockholm in the 1960s, he met his famous Swedish fellow composer Hilding Rosenberg (1892-1985). Ligeti wrote this musical greeting on the occasion of Rosenberg's 90th birthday.
The little piece is easy to play, composed in an extremely instrument-related manner and sounds really good. It shows that Ligeti, like Bach, Schumann and Bartok, was able to write easily playable and at the same time tonally convincing music in his personal style. Whether at an audition in a music school class or (as an encore) at a concert, it is impossible to resist the immediate charm of this composition.