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The delicious Sonata in Bb Major from the year 1818 by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was originally composed for a single piano, but with two players. The first time I saw the notation was in the mid 1980's, and I immediately realized its possibilities as an oboe quartet. At the time, I was still giving recitals at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and needed more 19th-century music to balance out my programs, and this work was exactly what I wanted to play.

As it turned out, I ended up performing the sonata with two pianists, simply taking over the left hand of the Primo part for the oboe. It made a big impression on the pianists in the audience, and that is saying a lot because those folks were a mighty discriminating group. The pianist, Nigel Coxe, told me that the finale is considered to be quite difficult because of its many shifts of tonality. Personally, I found the overall work to be of about the same difficulty as a Josef Sellner Duo. In fact, I imagined Schubert composing this piece for Sellner who was his contemporary, and who was actually working in Vienna in 1823 when Schubert's sonata first appeared in print as Opus 30. It was just two years later that Sellner published his tutor for the 13-keyed oboe.

Each movement of Schubert's Bb Major Sonata is a music-theory major's dream. Relationships of the third abound within its three movements. The outer movements are each set in sonata form, but the central section of the finale is a binary form. The middle movement, placed a major third above the tonic, is a wonderful binary form with trio and da capo; the trio, itself, is a development section.