----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Sutton" <[log in to unmask]>
>This evening I heard for the first time that there is a lost oboe
concerto
>by Beethoven.  I have read tons of bios and articles on LvB but have
>never heard of this piece.  Anyone have any information?
>Kevin

This came across the doublereed list:

   From the Houston Chronicle
   March 3, 2003, 9:07AM

   Dutch Beethoven lovers reconstruct lost oboe piece Associated
   Press ROTTERDAM, Netherlands -- Musicologists puzzled over a
   lost Ludwig von Beethoven concerto for decades, ever since the
   1960s discovery of the sketch of a single movement among the
   composer's papers.

   Now, two Dutch Beethoven enthusiasts have pieced together the
   musical clues, put them into 18th-century orchestral context and
   reconstructed the second movement of the only oboe concerto
   Beethoven ever wrote.

   The slow, melodic Largo movement of the Oboe Concerto in F Major
   was performed Saturday night in Rotterdam and billed as a "world
   premiere" even though the full concerto was performed at least
   once before, 210 years ago.

   "Premieres happen all the time. But a Beethoven piece that's
   never been heard?" said Conrad van Alphen, conductor of the
   Rotterdam Chamber Orchestra. "To have a Beethoven premiere is
   really special."

   The eight-minute piece was slipped into an evening of concert
   standards by Mozart and C.P.E. Bach without fanfare, barring a
   bold-print note on the program announcing the "premiere."

   The audience gave the movement warm applause but saved their
   standing ovations for more familiar pieces on the program.

   True, the recovered concerto is from an early work and gives
   little foretaste of the majestic symphonies he wrote while going
   deaf. The movement reveals a cautious Beethoven -- then a
   22-year-old student -- still influenced by Mozart and his teacher
   Franz Josef Haydn.

   Nonetheless, recovering the movement is significant -- mostly
   because of all the genres of music in Beethoven's prolific career,
   the oboe concerto was among the few he hardly touched.

   Beethoven wrote the concerto in 1792 as an exercise under Haydn
   and revised the second movement the following year.  It would
   be several more years before he published his Opus No. 1,
   announcing himself to be a composer.

   The only known copy of the oboe concerto vanished from a Vienna
   publishing house in the 1840s. Its existence was confirmed in
   1935, when researchers found an exchange of letters between Haydn
   and Beethoven's sponsor, in which the Austrian composer seeks a
   further stipend for his young German pupil.

   The sponsor's letter confirmed the oboe concerto had been performed
   in Bonn, Germany -- though he appeared unimpressed by it.

   Next, a Beethoven scholar found the opening notes of all three
   movements in a Bonn library and published them in 1964. Another
   scholar examined bundles of Beethoven's sketches, or drafts, in
   the British Library and, working with the clues found in Bonn,
   could identify the oboe concerto's second movement.

   Since then, experts have tried to rebuild the movement, but Jos
   van der Zanden and Cees Nieuwenhuizen are believed to be the
   first to do so with full orchestration.

   Van der Zanden, a musicologist with Dutch radio and a frequent
   contributor to the Beethoven Journal published in San Jose,
   Calif., worked for more than a year with composer Nieuwenhuizen
   to reconstruct a "sober 18th-century accompaniment."

   The two "had the skeleton, from the first to the last note," but
   were uncertain which passages were intended for the oboe soloist
   and which for the orchestra. Scoring the orchestration, they
   inferred harmonies from the way similar concertos were composed
   at the time, Van der Zanden said.

   The sketches also had clues for the full score -- a few marks
   and symbols above the staves indicating chords, cadences or links
   to other passages.

   "He probably had this lying on his desk when he wrote the score,"
   said Van der Zanden, still flushed after hearing it played before
   an audience for the first time.

   "It's a little conventional, but it has elements of the Beethoven
   to come," he said.

   Van der Zanden approached several orchestras to perform the
   movement, but all had full schedules booked years in advance.
   A friend in Rotterdam suggested the young chamber orchestra led
   by Van Alphen, a Dutch-South African conductor, formed in 2000.

   Performing on the oboe was Alexei Ogrintchouk, a Russian-born
   soloist with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra who, at 24,
   is roughly the same age as Beethoven when he scored the concerto.

   "It's a big responsibility," said the oboist, "but a joyful one."

 HTH,
Bruce Hunter