Concert pour Paris Céline Moinet & Folkwang Kammerorchester Essen & Reinhard Goebel

*Concert pour Paris* is anything but a foray into the standard Baroque repertoire. Rather, Moinet opens a door to a rarely explored world: oboe concertos from various European traditions, united by a shared pursuit of sonic perfection. Alessandro Besozzi’s concerto *Concert pour Paris* in G major—which lends its title to the recording—marks the beginning of this journey. His son Carlo, whose oboe artistry inspired Leopold Mozart to write effusive praise in 1778, is represented here with his Concerto No. 6 in B-flat major. “He has it all!” wrote Mozart Sr., and indeed, these scores seem to preserve that incredible breath control, that *messa di voce*, which astonished his contemporaries.

The true centerpiece of the recording, however, is Jean-Marie Leclair’s Concerto in C major, Op. 7 No. 3—a work whose compositional quality was long underestimated, yet which ranks among the few wind concertos of the French 18th century capable of holding their own on the international stage. Leclair, himself a man of boundaries and cultural exchange, shaped by both Italian and French influences, is the ideal focal point of a pan-European program. Moinet shapes it with the very care that was dear to the composer’s own heart: he meticulously notated every ornament to protect his work from amateurish distortion. In Moinet’s interpretation, this meticulousness comes to life—the ornaments do not sound forced, but rather breathe naturally.

Two concertos by Franz Xaver Richter, the Moravian Kapellmeister of Strasbourg Cathedral, round out the program. Richter’s concertos create space and contrast: the opulent Concerto in F major, with its powerful ritornellos, and the Concerto da Camera in G minor, with its chamber-music-like delicacy, open up the album in both directions—inward and outward.

*Concert Pour Paris* brings to light what has lain in the shadows for centuries: a repertoire of remarkable diversity and quality that reveals the oboe for what it is—an instrument of inexhaustible expressive power. Céline Moinet makes this case with a technique that is never an end in itself and a stylistic sensibility that not only expertly distinguishes Baroque traditions but also fills them with pulsating life.