Composer's NoteSecond Meeting was written in January 1992. The first performance took place in Stockholm in February (Bengt Rosengren oboe and Stefan Bojsten piano). The work belongs to a planned series of virtuosoduos 'meetings'. The first one (from 1982) is written for clarinet and harpsichord.Formally Second Meeting is very close to a familiar 'theme and variations' category although there are seven themes or melodies all quiteclosely related.In the autumn of the same year I decided to write a version of the piece for oboe and a small orchestra trying to remain reasonably faithful to the original (a la Ravel perhaps). The orchestral version iscalled Mimo 1).Esa-Pekka Salonen

An Evening in the Village was composed in 1908 as no. 5 of the Ten Easy Piano Pieces. It has become one of Bartók's favorite works which the composer himself was fond of playing at recitals. As he explained in an American interview it was ''an original composition that is ... with themes of my own invention but ... the themes are in the style of the Hungarian-Transylvanian folk tunes. There are two themes. The first one is a parlando-rubato-rhythm and the second one is more in a dance-like rhythm. The second one is more or less the imitation of a peasant flute playing.'' Bartók also orchestrated the piece in 1931 as no. 1 of HungarianSketches. In 2015 we are launching a series entitled Bartók Transcriptions for Music Students to mark the 70th anniversary of the composer’s death. This involves reissuing our tried publications and publishing some further new transcriptions that fulfill in every respect the strict aesthetic demands of the earlier ones. We trust these publications will allow us to introduce still more music students to the realm of one of the great geniuses of 20th-century music.

Created in 1947 as part of the four exam pieces for the Paris Conservatoire this Sonate for Oboe and Piano is one of the early works of Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) a French Composer following the paths of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy with an idiosyncratic way of writing. Sonate was part of the compositions that were later disowned by the composer who considered them as being not mature enough compared to his main work even though they were played and enjoyed regularly all over the world. This duet integrates a variety of contrapuntal procedures which were highly appreciated by the composer. Composed of threemovements the first one begins with an austere canon while the latter two comprise more texture. Henri Dutilleux was internationally acclaimed for his work winning prizes such as the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society and the UNESCO's International Rostrum of Composers among many others. His work also includes a Piano sonata two symphonies the Cello concerto Tout un monde lointain (A whole distant world) the Violin concerto L'arbre des songes (The tree of dreams) and the string quartet Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night).

Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923, but was forced to emigrate via Ecuador to New York in 1939 because of her Jewish descent. In 2006 she returned to the city where she was born.In about three minutes, the small and charming two-part piece Kontraste [Contrasts] for oboe and harp captivates with clarity and limitation to the essentials. The name says it all: A lively humoresque is followed by a rather delicate, even almost melancholy second movement which is headed 'largo e mesto'. The composition was written in 2009/10 as a birthday present for the Swiss oboist - and this work's dedicatee - Heinz Holliger (and his wife, the harpist Ursula Holliger). / Hautbois Et Piano