François Leleux on Future Horizons

It's been a while since we gave much love to the oboe at Presto, so a chat with one of the most famous oboists of our times, François Leleux, was long overdue. His latest album is distinctly ambassadorial for his instrument, opening up new territory in terms of both technique and repertoire. It features three brand-new works for oboe and orchestra that draw variously on Impressionist techniques, Baroque counterpoint, and jazz influences to create new soundworlds. I spoke to François to find out more about how this album came to life, and what the pieces are like to perform. 

How did the idea of an album of pieces for solo oboe and orchestra first come into being? Was it always planned to comprise three new commissions?

First of all, I'd recorded pieces from the oboe repertoire, from an all-Bach CD with Sony, then Mozart, then Italian concertos - Vivaldi, Marcello, Cimarosa - and then the Richard Strauss concerto with the Serenade, and chamber music with Britten and Mozart. But I'd always wanted to record a CD with twenty-first-century concertos (and there are a lot of them, actually). As I had this wonderful residency with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, we had the possibility of recording all those concerts. And of the course of one year we performed Michael Jarrell's Aquateinte (written especially for that orchestra), the Escaich Double Concerto, and Nicolas Bacri's Notturno that he'd written for me a little bit before. And those recordings were all live.

This CD had originally been going to be called 'Frankfurt Legacy', because it was related to that residency in 2014-15. But as I'm really involved in expanding the repertoire for the oboe (and for the orchestra), 'Future Horizons' is actually a very good title, because what we need as artists, all over the world, is to expand the repertoire. That's always been a very important aspect of my job - ever since I was a teenager, in fact. Having this CD with the three pieces was always meant to be the next step after the Frankfurt residency. 

How much did you collaborate with the composers - both on specific technical questions and on the music more broadly?

I don't like to give the composer any limits; I want to expand the technique of the oboe, like Heinz Holliger did. I don't want the composer to be limited by anything - I want them to write the way they dream, or the way they are inspired, and I always try to do the best I can, to come as near to their wishes as I can. This normally works - though Michael Jarrell's oboe concerto is one of the most difficult I've ever played in my life! It's about 370 bars, and when he wrote it it contained no breaks for the soloist. No tuttis - the oboe playing the whole time. And I said to him that there were three bars in that piece that I was going to omit, because otherwise he was going to have a dead oboist on his conscience...

Even so, there's very little rest in this concerto. The Strauss oboe concerto famously has sixty bars without a break for the soloist at the start, but in Jarrell it's more like ninety - and extremely virtuosic, extremely fast. It's a challenge. And I think it's great to have this kind of challenge. 

Likewise with Nicolas Bacri - I have a long-standing relationship with him, and he's written many pieces for me. There's actually a CD available with works of his themed around the four seasons, for oboe with other solo instruments plus orchestra. So I've done a lot of things with him - but I never had to say 'this isn't possible' - what I try is to get into the language of the composer. I don't think it should be the soloist or the conductor who is telling the composer how to write - we should be flexible, to learn a new language. Just as I've tried to learn English. It's not a straightforward task, but I try to learn it in order (among other things) to understand English music. French composers do often seem to have something in common, but if you play Bacri or Escaich those are two completely different worlds. 

The oboe isn’t the loudest instrument in the world, yet it does have a penetrating tone that can make itself heard. What’s the writing like, in terms of how Nicolas Bacri and Michael Jarrell balance the solo part with the orchestral forces?

Well, you know that the oboe gives the A to the orchestra when tuning up because it's the easiest to hear - so it's quite a strong instrument. They did experiments in America to see how many violins you need to completely cover the sound of the oboe so that you can't hear it any more. How many do you think it was?

Say... forty?

Four hundred! Four hundred violins to completely cover up the sound of the oboe. So it always comes through. It's one of the loudest instruments, along with the trumpet (which sometimes it resembles). The problem for many oboists is not to play loudly enough, it's to play quietly; to have that kind of relaxed, beautiful, singing colour without that penetrating sound. It's a very focused sound, which helps with projection and helps you as a soloist. But the Bacri, for example, is a very soft piece, and to play softly in the low register of the oboe is a real challenge. 

For Nicolas Bacri’s Notturno you’re both the soloist and the conductor. Do you prefer this (where possible) to having a separate conductor?

I don't exactly prefer it - I like each format. I think it's great to have a conductor who is able to inspire you like Andrés Orozco-Estrada or Iván Fischer or Yannick Nézet-Séguin, or Ticciati or Jansons, but what is important is the collaboration. You can't play Martinů or Strauss without a conductor. The same with Jarrell and Escaich. Otherwise it becomes a circus act - you can do this sort of thing but it becomes very difficult. It's too active. You need to put the music first. With the Bacri it's possible because it's a very slow, beautiful dark sound - Notturno - and there are many things like Hummel, Haydn or Mozart that you can do without a conductor. 

But equally, if a conductor wants to do Mozart with me, I'm happy with that too. That way I can get new inspiration, new ideas, new input. So I wouldn't say one or the other is better - the priority is always whatever serves the music best. 

The commentary from the three composers on their respective works and processes is relatively brief; can you give readers a few pointers as to what they should listen out for in each of these pieces?

Let's start with the double concerto, which I perform with Lisa Batiashvili my wife, by Thierry Escaich. It's extremely rhythmically vivid, and very alert - almost Baroque, with a bit of jazz in it (since Baroque also plays around with rhythm). But also very virtuosic, and the slow movement is very lyrical, with a short violin cadenza that could almost be seen as a kind of recitative. 

Nicolas Bacri's Notturno is a very dark piece; it has this amazing melodic line in the low register of the oboe, and you get a kind of nostalgic atmosphere. And in Aquateinte by Michael Jarrell (who also composed a triple concerto Sillages, which I recorded with Emmanuel Pahud and Paul Meyer), it's like a twenty-first-century take on Impressionism. The name refers to a watercolour, and that's exactly the technique that he uses in composing. If you listen to this music with too 'accurate' an ear, you will miss the point - the point is to hear all the music together, with some distance - that's how you get the most out of it. Just as with Impressionist art - if you look at one square centimetre of it, it looks like nothing, but if you're two or three metres back, you get the impact. And that's the way to hear this wonderful composer.