WILD REEDS

James Austin Smith proves that an oboist can have an adventurous solo career.

- ALEX ROSS

No one has ever become world-famous by playing the oboe. Although the instrument has an integral role in the orchestral ecosystem—every ensemble tunes to its piercing A—the sweet-and-sour tang of its sound limits its popularity as a solo voice, particularly in comparison with the mellifluousness of the flute or the clarinet. To be sure, classical music aficionados can reel off the names of significant oboists past and present: the pioneering British virtuoso Léon Goossens; the French-born Marcel Tabuteau, who exerted a vast influence on American oboe playing during his long tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra; and the contemporary Swiss oboist, composer, and conductor Heinz Holliger, who has greatly expanded the instrument’s repertory. Yet none quite counts as a household name.

The forty-year-old American oboist James Austin Smith, who recently presented “Hearing Memory,” an adventurous program of East German music, at National Sawdust, in Brooklyn, has made his path all the more challenging by choosing to work outside the orchestral cocoon. Someone with his high level of training—he studied at Northwestern University, the Yale School of Music, and the Leipzig Hochschule für Musik und Theater—might have been expected to make the rounds of orchestra auditions, in the hope of winning a post in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or the like. Smith has remained independent, although in 2017 he found a measure of stability by assuming a teaching post at Stony Brook University.