The oboe is cer­tainly not a pre­val­ent in­stru­ment for a mu­si­cian's so­loist ca­reer, but when Al­brecht May­er plays the oboe, audi­ences and crit­ics alike go in­to rap­tures. Crit­ics write about the "di­vine spark" that in­spires his play­ing, or about the "mi­ra­cu­lous oboe" that turns in­to "an in­stru­ment of se­duc­tion". His play­ing has a par­tic­u­larly warm tone, and an ex­cep­tion­al wealth of dif­fer­ent fa­cets, so that it's no great sur­prise that Al­brecht May­er is one of today's most sought-after in­ter­na­tion­al oboists. A crit­ic once wrote about Al­brecht May­er that the tone emit­ting from his oboe soun­ded like singing. The 'can­tabile' char­ac­ter of his style is ex­plained by a mu­sic­al train­ing based on the voice: be­fore he star­ted to play the oboe at the age of 10, he had already been a mem­ber of the Bam­berg Cathed­ral Choir for sev­er­al years.

Al­brecht May­er stud­ied with Ger­hard Sch­euer, Georg Meer­wein, Ingo Gor­itzki und Maurice Bourgue. He em­barked on a pro­fes­sion­al ca­reer in 1990, when he joined the Bam­berg Sym­phony Or­ches­tra as solo oboist. Two years later, he made the trans­ition to the ab­so­lute top league with his ap­point­ment as solo oboist of the Ber­lin Phil­har­mon­ic, and since then he has made count­less in­ter­na­tion­al ap­pear­ances, play­ing un­der such well-known con­duct­ors as Clau­dio Ab­bado, Sir Si­mon Rattle und Nikolaus Harnon­court. He reg­u­larly per­forms to­geth­er with the Ber­lin Baroque So­loists and can be heard in a solo role on many of their re­cord­ings. In ad­di­tion to his activ­it­ies as a so­loist, Al­brecht May­er also at­taches im­port­ance to cham­ber mu­sic, and he cer­tainly has plenty of op­por­tun­it­ies to play in a group set­ting. He is a per­man­ent mem­ber of the Sabine Mey­er Wind En­semble and also per­forms - time per­mit­ting - with such part­ners as Thomas Quas­thoff, Mat­thi­as Go­erne and Leif Ove Andsnes.

Also avail­able: Al­brecht May­er in Con­cert, a con­cert re­cord­ing with Al­brecht May­er play­ing J.S.Bach.

The doc­u­ment­ary is avail­able on DVD to­geth­er with a re­lay of the re­cord­ing ses­sion in Warsaw for his Al­bum "New Sea­sons".