A shepherd, Nikolio, sits on a rocky plain, playing his pipe. So opens Act 3 of Martinů’s powerful opera The Greek Passion. The intonations, using an English horn rather than the ancient shawm implied by the stage directions, are somewhat strange, the scale odd, disjointed, elusive. Martinů’s Oboe Concerto opens in the same modality after a short orchestral prelude. While the connection between these works is striking, it is hardly surprising. The Oboe Concerto was conceived at the same time Martinů was sketching out ideas for an adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ searing novel Christ Recrucified (that would become The Greek Passion) after meeting with the author. As part of the project, Martinů began a detailed study of Byzantine music, and part of this spirit infuses the Oboe Concerto.

That is to say, “part of,” for Martinů, like Mozart and many others before him, has not so much a “style” but a “style of styles.” Almost immediately, following the “Byzantine” opening, we find ourselves immersed in a charming pastoral world. And the movement is by turns mysterious, agitated, charming, and even mischievous, with here and there some Baroque touches (Martinů was a huge fan of the Baroque concerto). It is astonishing how many “looks” the composer is able to sustain in a movement that is just over five minutes long. In the words of Los Angeles Philharmonic Principal Oboist and tonight’s soloist, Ryan Roberts, this reveals “the many shades of the human condition.”

The composer certainly had a range of experiences to draw on: Born in a church tower high above the borderlands between Bohemia and Moravia in 1890, he fled Europe in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis, spending the war years in the United States, where he made a name for himself as a symphonist. By the date of the concerto, 1955, he had returned to Europe, where he remained until his death in 1959, a permanent exile, never returning to Czechoslovakia. During this last period, Martinů’s music could veer between modernist experimentalism and pastoral intonations…and everything in between.

The second movement, provocative and profound, reveals this trait. After an ominous orchestral introduction, leading to two mysterious horn calls, the oboe enters. Once more we are in the spirit of the shepherd boy, Nikolio, searching and exploring without reaching any kind of resolution. In fact, the tension increases until we get a slight respite with some of the composer’s relaxed cadences leading to another horn solo. Only toward the very end of the movement does the sun come out; and this musical language recalls one of Martinů’s most beloved and nostalgic works, the cantata Opening of the Springs, written the same year as the concerto.

The finale is an astonishing conclusion. It begins in dark shades, somewhat gloomy, but quickly brightens until the oboe enters with the kind of manic energy we find in the last movement of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, only to have mysterious “Nikolio” music take over the middle of the movement in an extended cadenza before the concerto bursts out again, to close with astonishing dynamism.

—Michael Beckerman